Friday's initial and continued jobless claims resume the trend of "less awful" numbers.
New jobless claims fell to under 1,000,000 for the first time on an un-adjusted basis - 984,192 to be specific (gold in the graph below). After seasonal adjustment, they declined 249,000 to a new pandemic low of 1,186,000 (blue):
Continuing claims (red, right scale) reported for the prior week also made a new pandemic low of 16,107,000.
All of these remain at far worse levels than even at their worst during the Great Recession. Further, that there are still 1 million "new"