Jobless claims come in above expectations again with 1.48 million

Weekly jobless claims have once again come in above expectations.

The Labor Department on Thursday said 1.48 million Americans filed initial unemployment claims last week, which is down 60,000 claims from the week before. It's the 12th straight week that the number has dropped, per The Associated Press, but this was also higher than the 1.35 million claims economists had been expecting, CNBC reports.

That makes this the second week in a row that the unemployment claims have been higher than forecast, Bloomberg notes. Last week, there were about 1.5 million initial jobless claims reported, more than the 1.3 million expected. This adds "to signs that the recovery is cooling amid a pickup in coronavirus cases," Bloomberg writes. The number of continuing claims fell to 19.5 million, which CNBC notes is the first time that number has been below 20 million in two months.

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But this is also the 14th week that there have been more than one million new unemployment claims. For comparison, the record before the coronavirus pandemic was 695,000. The fact that such a high number of Americans are still filing claims about three months after the coronavirus crisis started, The Washington Post's Heather Long writes, is "highly concerning," as "that number should be coming down if the job situation was truly improving."