Unemployment rate rises to 13.7% in the 4th week of July, says IBGE

In just seven days, the unemployment rate in Brazil jumped from 13.1% in the third week of July to 13.7% in the fourth week of the month, according to data from the National Survey by Covid Household Sample (Pnad Covid-19), released by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE).
The unemployed population was estimated at 12.9 million people in the fourth week of July, about half a million more than the 12.4 million recorded the previous week.
The total number of people employed was 81.2 million in the week of July 19-25, about 600,000 less than the previous week's level, when there were 81.8 million people employed.
About 5.8 million workers, equivalent to 7.1% of the employed population, were away from work due to social isolation measures in the fourth week of July. The result represents about 400,000 people less than the level of a week earlier, when this quota totaled 6.2 million or 7.5% of the employed population.
The employed and not away population from work was estimated at 72.3 million people, compared to a quota of 72.5 million workers registered in the previous week.
In the fourth week of July, 8.3 million people, or 11.5% of the employed, worked remotely. In the previous week, there were 8.2 million people in remote work, 11.3% of those employed.
The population outside the workforce - who were neither working nor looking for work - totaled 76.0 million in the fourth week of July, up from a total of 76.2 million the week before. Among the inactive, about 28.0 million people, or 36.9% of the population outside the workforce, said they would like to work. Approximately 18.5 million inactive people who would like to work claimed that they did not seek work because of the pandemic or because they did not find an occupation in the locality where they lived.
The level of occupation was 47.7% in the fourth week of July, compared to a level of 48.0% in the previous week. The proxy of the informality rate increased from 32.5% in the third week of July to 33.5% in the fourth week of the month.
Pnad Covid also reported that 13.3 million people, equivalent to 6.3% of the Brazilian population, had at least one of the 12 symptoms associated with flu syndrome (fever, cough, sore throat, difficulty breathing, headache, chest pain, nausea, stuffy or running nose, fatigue, eye pain, loss of smell or taste and muscle pain) investigated by the research. In the previous week, this quota was 13.8 million people.
About 3.3 million people, 24.3% of those who had any symptoms, sought medical care. More than 82% of these visits occurred in the public health system. Among those who sought care, 159,000 (14.5%) were hospitalized, compared to a total of 135,000 hospitalizations in the previous week.