Chautauqua County’s unemployment rate has nearly doubled in the past 12 months, sitting at 9.6% as of January.

The number of employed workers decreased by 2,500 from January 2020 to 48,200 while the number of unemployed county residents increased by 2,000 from January 2020 to 5,100.

The unemployment rate has increased from 5.7% in January 2020 to 9.6%in January 2021, an increase of 3.9 percentage points.

Neighboring counties have not been hit as hard by COVID-19 as Chautauqua County. Chautauqua County’s unemployment rate increase is the highest among the counties not considered by the state Labor Department as a major labor area, with unemployment here increasing nearly twice as much as Sullivan County’s 2.3% increase over the past year to 6.9%.

Allegany County has seen employment decrease by 200 people from January 2020 to January 2021 while its number of unemployed increased by 100 over the year from 1,300 to 1,400.

Allegany County’s unemployment rate increased 0.7 percentage points from 6.5% to 7.2%. In Cattaraugus County, the number of employed county residents decreased by 1,200 from January 2020 to January 2021 from 32,400 to 31,200 while the number of unemployed county residents increased by 300 from 2,200 to 2,500. Cattaraugus County’s unemployment rate increased over the past 12 months from 6.3% to 7.5%.

The unemployment statistics are the second disappointing economic report in the past week for Chautauqua County.

According to state Labor Department statistics, the county has lost 4,600 jobs from January 2020 to January 2021. That number is the most in the state for non-metropolitan areas, with Otsego County’s 2,900 jobs lost the next-highest number.

The county lost 9.4% of its jobs in the past year — as a percentage of total jobs lost, the county’s job losses are fourth only to Seneca County (12.6%), Otsego County (11.8%) and Sullivan County (9.5%) among non-metropolitan counties.

How quickly will the economy — both in New York state and Chautauqua County– recover from the COVID-19 doldrums? State officials have said it could be two or three years, and E.J. McMahon, founder and senior fellow of the Empire Center for Public Policy, said that estimate appears to be accurate.

“New York’s recovery from the pandemic economic crash remains both weak and fragile,” McMahon wrote in a recent blog post on the center’s website. “Increasing vaccinations and a decrease in COVID infections and hospitalizations are signs of hope for a return to something resembling economic and social normalcy by late summer (or fall?), but the state’s economy — especially New York City — has very, very far to go. Unfortunately, there remains little reason to quarrel with Budget Division projections that predict employment will not recover to pre-pandemic levels for at least two more years.”