COLUMBUS — For the week ending April 11, the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services (ODJFS) reported 158,678 initial jobless claims to the U.S. Department of Labor.

The number of initial jobless claims filed in Ohio over the last four weeks stands at 855,197. To put that in perspective, the total for the last four weeks of claims is 139,685 more than the combined total of 715,512 for the last two years.

Over these last four weeks, ODJFS has distributed more than $227 million in unemployment compensation payments to more than 271,000 claimants.

ODJFS urges individuals to file their claims online, if possible, at unemployment.ohio.gov. Each claim is important to us, and we recognize the hardship that the COVID-19 pandemic has placed on many Ohio families.

We are hiring more people, working longer hours and adding more technological capacity so that we can serve Ohioans as quickly as possible. We have extended our call center to a seven-day-a-week operation and have nearly 1,200 staff taking calls with plans to launch a virtual call center by the end of next week.

All eligible Ohioans will receive their unemployment benefits – and any delays in processing their claims will not reduce the amount received. ODJFS will not rest until all eligible Ohioans are served.

For more information, on the internet, go to https://unemployment.ohio.gov/ .

Those without internet access can call 1-877-644-6562 (OHIO-JOB) from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. weekdays, from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Saturdays and from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. on Sundays.

Workers who lose their jobs as a result of the coronavirus can enter the mass-layoff number 2000180 on their applications.

However, if affected individuals have already submitted claims without this number, they do not need to add it.As a reminder, mass layoff notices are posted at jfs.ohio.gov/warn/current.stm.