ORLANDO, Fla. — Florida’s unemployment rate continues to climb amid the coronavirus pandemic, with Central Florida remaining the hardest hit economically.

Florida Department of Economic Opportunity announced Friday that the state’s May 2020 unemployment rate grew to 14.5 percent.

That is up .7 percent from April 2020, which was 13.8 percent.

It should be noted that April’s unemployment number was revised from 12.9 to 13.8 percent, due to a survey calculated by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, DEO said.

As businesses are beginning to reopen across the state, various regions are seeing workers return to their jobs, except Central Florida, where DEO says the region is continuing to see job losses.

Adrienne Johnston, Chief of DEO’s Bureau of Labor Market Statistics, said Central Florida lost an estimated 56,300 jobs in May 2020.

“It’s very apparent leisure and hospitality is an area that continues to either see job losses or not gain them back as quickly, so with the Orlando metro, there’s high a concentration of those types of jobs. So that area is more impacted more than other areas of the state,” Johnston said.

The figures are based on a person’s residence, not the location of their workplace.

The overall 14.5 percent unemployment rate in May, Johnston said, represents approximately 1.4 million Floridians out of a 9 million person workforce.

Osceola (32.3 percent), Orange (23.4 percent), and Lake (19.1 percent) counties are the top three counties in the state in terms of unemployment rate.

The unemployment rate is a different scale than jobless claims, where Miami-Dade County has the most number of individuals who have filed for unemployment benefits.

Following Miami-Dade (241,000 claims) is Broward County (187,000 claims), and then Orange County (178,000 claims). Osceola County represents 59,000 unemployment claims filed.

As the number of coronavirus cases continue to grow, many workers have told Spectrum News that they are expected to be out of work for several more months.

DEO said it is not able to predict how the unemployment rate may adjust in the months to come.

“These are unprecedented times, so it’s going to be difficult to provide meaningful projections and we’re very cautious about putting numbers out there that we can’t back up through rigorous methods,” Johnston said.