Number of Brazilians away from work by pandemic drops to 7 million

The number of Brazilians away from work by pandemic fell to 7 million in the week of July 5-11, according to Pnad Covid19 (National Household Sample Survey), released on Friday (31) by IBGE (Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics).
In the previous week, 8.3 million were in this situation (10.1% of the employed population), while in the week of May 3-9 the quota was 16.6 million (19.8%).
The unemployed population was estimated at 12.2 million people, stable compared to the previous week (11.5 million), but grew compared to the week of May 3-9 (9.8 million
The number of employed people working remotely fell from 8.9 million to 8.2 million. There are about 700,000 people who may have returned to face-to-face work with the flexibilization of social distancing measures.
The coordinator of the research, Maria Lúcia Vieira, says this was the first significant drop. "This is the first significant drop in this group since early May, when the survey began. The reduction was observed in both absolute (643,000) and percentage values (11.6%) and it reflects what we're already seeing, which is the return of some of these people to their workplaces before the pandemic," he said.
The survey shows that 19.2 million Brazilians did not seek employment during the week because of the coronavirus pandemic or because they did not find an occupation in the locality in which they lived. After a fall in June (17.3 million), this group returned to the level of early May (19.1 million).
The occupancy rate stood at 81.1 million, which means that less than half of the population (47.6%) was working on the second week of July.
The rate of workers in informality stood at 34.0%, reaching 27.6 million people. At the beginning of May, there were 29.9 million.