⁍ Since early in the pandemic, the federal government has added $600 to the weekly unemployment checks that states send.

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⁍ That increase ends this week.

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⁍ With Congress still haggling over next steps, most states will not be able to offer nearly as much.

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– As public health officials warned Friday that the coronavirus posed new risks to parts of the Midwest and South, enhanced federal payments that helped avert financial ruin for millions of unemployed Americans were set to expire—leaving threadbare safety nets offered by individual states to catch them, the AP reports. Since early in the pandemic, the federal government has added $600 to the weekly unemployment checks that states send. That increase ends this week, and with Congress still haggling over next steps, most states will not be able to offer nearly as much. The extra federal aid helped keep Wally Wendt and his family afloat. The extra federal benefits helped him pay a loan to put a new roof on his house that he took out before the virus struck and the economy cratered. The money also helps his daughter, who lost her restaurant job. Without it, Wendt said, his daughter and her two children might move in with him. Without it, he says, “the pressure’s not on them, it’s on all of us blue-collar workers who are struggling to make a living.” In addition to the end of the $600 payments, federal protections against evictions also are set to expire. Standard unemployment benefits often leave recipients with poverty-level incomes, but they are sure to continue, even as states wrestle with diminishing unemployment trust funds.