Show-Me State Times

Sen. Andrew Koenig (R-Manchester) has spoken against strict COVID-19 regulations which, according to him, are not a solution to eliminating the virus.

“Shutting down our economy won’t eradicate the virus. It’s my choice if I want to risk getting COVID. No one is forcing anybody to stay home,” Koenig said, as reported by St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

Missouri Republicans are seeking to strip powers from county officials who have been blamed for the collapse of businesses in the state. Churches and businesses have been shuttered due to the COVID-19 restrictions.

Missouri ranks 41st on the list of states with the biggest increase in unemployment claims since last week, and 36th since the COVID-19 pandemic began, according to WalletHub.

Missouri has seen an 87.17 percent change in unemployment claims when comparing the first full week in January versus the same week in 2019. There's also a 52.44 percent change in unemployment claims when comparing the first full week in January to the beginning of 2020. Missouri also has seen a 616.47 percent jump in unemployment claims when comparing claims from the beginning of the pandemic to the previous year.

Democratic states have more unemployment claims than Republican states, at 27.76 percent to 24.27 percent, WalletHub reports. States were designated as red or blue in the report by how they voted in the 2020 election.

Two COVID-19 vaccines are available, but it will still be months before they will be widely available.  

With the pandemic raging across the country and COVID-19 lockdowns causing business openings to be stalled, the slowdown has had a negative impact on the bulk of the country's job market.

Currently, there are 10.7 million Americans who are unemployed due to COVID-19 restrictions. For the first full week of January, there were a total of 965,000 new unemployment claims across the country, which is an 86 percent reduction since the peak of the pandemic at 6.9 million.

WalletHub compared each of the 50 states, as well as Washington, D.C., across three separate metrics, comparing the first week in January to the same week in 2019, the same week to the start of 2020, and the start of the pandemic to the previous year.