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Congressman Steny H. Hoyer (MD-05) and members of the Maryland Congressional Delegation, including Senators Ben Cardin and Chris Van Hollen, and Congressmen Dutch Ruppersberger, John P. Sarbanes, Kweisi Mfume, Anthony G. Brown, Jamie B. Raskin, and David Trone, during a conference call yesterday again urged Maryland Secretary of Labor Tiffany Robinson to redouble the agency’s efforts to improve the expediency with which Marylanders’ claims for Unemployment Insurance (UI) are processed.

More than 200,000 Americans have now died from COVID-19.

Despite recent statements by Governor Hogan that the backlog has been cleared, we continue to hear daily from constituents who haven’t received benefits.

With its disproportionate impact on people of color, the coronavirus pandemic has raised awareness of long-standing health disparities among African Americans and other minority communities in Maryland.

We are pleased that the Paycheck Protection Program and Health Care Enhancement Act, signed into law on April 24, 2020, included $11 billion for states, localities, territories, and tribes for necessary expenses to develop, purchase, administer, process, and analyze COVID-19 tests.

Since the Maryland Department of Health began collecting and publicly releasing race, ethnicity, and zip code level data on Maryland cases of the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19), the data has clearly demonstrated that the virus is having a disproportionate impact on communities of color, specifically Black and Hispanic residents of our state.