Economists suggest a state backlog could explain why new unemployment numbers are still so high

Falling unemployment claims might be even lower than they appear.

Around 1.5 million Americans filed for unemployment benefits last week, according to Labor Department numbers released Thursday, narrowly beating economists' expectations of 1.6 million. That's down from 1.8 million the week before, and due to backlogs of unemployment claims still piled up in some states, some economists think the real numbers could be even smaller, Politico reports.

With more than 40 million Americans filing unemployment claims over the past three months, several states have had trouble keeping up. Wisconsin reported a backlog of 100,000 still-unprocessed claims on Wednesday, and Oregon even brought in the National Guard to help file. As of last week, Bloomberg reports that a third of unemployment benefits totaling close to $70 billion have yet to be paid. That backlog could mean many of this week's claims were actually filed a while ago and that the economy is looking a little better than it seems — not that adding to past weeks' exploding jobless numbers is necessarily a good thing.

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Still, Adam Ozimek, the chief economist at freelance recruiting business Upwork, thinks the whole total can't be attributed to backlogs. "We are 12 weeks into this," he tweeted, and predictions from another pair of economists continue to accurately predict unemployment totals each week based on Google searches. But Ozimek does note that this "is not a normal labor market," and it's hard to say for certain what's happening because "we don't know what an entire economy frozen for almost three months and then slowly thawed will look like."