St. Louis Reporter

Sen. Bob Onder (R-Lake Saint Louis) has spoken against COVID-19 restrictions, saying the pandemic is being politicized and the restrictions are unjustifiable.

“I think there’s this illusion on the part of politicians that we can somehow control this. Many of these were irrational and arbitrary rules,” the senator said, as reported by St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

Republican lawmakers in Missouri are seeking to limit local authorities’ control over health restrictions related to infectious diseases. Local authorities have been blamed by individuals and small businesses for shuttering the economy and increasing the rate of unemployment.

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

Missouri has seen an 87.17 percent change in unemployment claims when comparing the first full week of January versus the same week in 2019. There’s also a 52.44 percent change in unemployment claims when comparing the first full week of 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.