The Illinois Department of Employment Security (IDES) released numbers on Friday showing how dramatically the COVID-19 pandemic has affected employment in Illinois.
The department processed 102,937 initial unemployment claims for the week ending April 18 and has processed more than 755,000 initial unemployment claims from March 1 through April 18, 12 times the number of claims the department processed over the same period last year.
From March 1 through April 16, the department paid out more than $700 million in benefits. In the first two weeks of April alone, IDES paid . . .
