Six-week surge of New York jobless claims tops 1.6 million

The surge of unemployment insurance claims continued in New York last week — almost 219,000 people filed an initial claim in the state, the U.S. Department of Labor reported Thursday morning. That total is up about 6% from the previous week, and it continues a run of extraordinarily high numbers of initial claims set off by the coronavirus pandemic and the measures taken to slow it. Roughly 1.6 million people have filed an initial claim in New York since the start of the surge six weeks ago.…