All but a few states imposed business lockdowns and “stay at home” orders in April. However, New York’s private-sector job losses were well beyond the national norm—indicating the Empire State’s economic recovery could lag behind the rest of the country.

This is an installment in a special series of #NYCoronavirus chronicles by Empire Center analysts, focused on New York’s state and local policy response to the coronavirus pandemic.

The following rollover map is based on state-by-state counts of private employment from “payroll establishment data,” as assembled by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Unlike the unemployment rate, which is based on the residence of the workers, these counts reflect the location of employers.

As noted here last week, this was New York’s lowest statewide April private employment level since 1996. New York City, which accounted for nearly half the decline since last year, is now back to 2010 private employment levels. But in most other regions of the state, private employment in April was the lowest in at least 30 years, going back to the 1990 start of the current data series.

A state-by-state ranking of the year-to-year change in private-sector jobs is depicted below.