The battle against coronavirus continues to take a toll on workers across the state with a record-high 878,727 Californians filing for jobless benefits in the week ended March 28.

U.S. Department of Labor figures show the staggering weekly tally of initial jobless claims was up 691,918 from the previous peak of 186,809 set the previous week. The filing pace is up nearly five-fold in seven days, and it’s a jump of almost 22-fold above a year ago.

This two-week spree of benefit claims follows numerous business closings required by state and local government “stay at home” orders issued to slow the spread of the pandemic. The closures have been a huge blow to the statewide economy.

Let’s look at just how big these job cuts are …

1. The last time jobless claims were anywhere this high in California was amid the Great Recession: 115,462 in the week ended Jan. 16, 2010.

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2. Since 2000, a period that included two recessions, the state averaged 52,000 filings a week.

3. The 1.07 million filings in the past two weeks compare to 2.1 million benefits requests made in the previous 52 weeks.

4. The two week’s filings are far above the 841,000 Californians officially unemployed in February.

5. My trusty spreadsheet says, roughly speaking, if you simply added the past two weeks of claims to the official jobless count, California’s unemployment rate leaps to 9.3% from 4.3%. The last time a jobless rate was that high in California was in 2013, early in the economic recovery from the Great Recession.

Initial claims are seen as a good early indicator of job losses. But it’s by no means a perfect measure of folks out of work. Not everyone who seeks those benefits is eligible to collect them. Not everyone who qualifies applies quickly.

This jobless count will only go higher as more businesses close and the benefits system remains swamped by the unprecedented inflow of claims. More than 1.6 million Californians have filed for unemployment since March 13, including 150,000 since the start of the week, Gov. Gavin Newsom said Tuesday.

The federal stimulus plan offers more generous and expanded unemployment benefits to a group that now includes many business owners and sole proprietors. That financial relief, an attempt to dampen economic fallout, will also boost the jobless claims number.

And, remember, California isn’t the only state with economic damage from this wave of business limitations.

Nationwide, 6.65 million claims were filed in a week, breaking a record also set a week ago — by 3.34 million. That’s a 101% jump in seven days. In the past two weeks, the national jobless claims totaled 9.96 million vs. 11.31 million filings overall in the previous 52 weeks.

What might this do to the U.S. jobless rate? In February, the nation had 5.79 million jobless and a 3.5% unemployment rate. My trusty spreadsheet says if every new claimant was added to the jobless count, the unemployment rate soars to 9.5%.