SALEM — Oregon added 20,500 jobs in July and the state’s jobless rate dropped to 10.4%, according to new data out Tuesday, Aug. 18, from the Oregon Employment Department, down from 11.6 in June’s newly revised tally.

The pace of new layoffs has eased considerably, returning to pre-pandemic levels. Oregon has now added back about 40% of the jobs it lost early in the coronavirus outbreak.

But nearly 220,000 Oregonians were still out of work — 2.6 times more than in July 2019. The rate of recovery seems to be slowing, too, with Oregon adding just about one-third as many jobs in July as it did in June.

The national unemployment rate was 10.2% in July.

Oregon’s largest gains in July came in leisure and hospitality, a segment of the economy nearly obliterated last spring when the state shut down to contain spread of the coronavirus. With Oregon continuing to report hundreds of new coronavirus cases daily, though, hotels and restaurants aren’t likely to fully recover until the pandemic is contained.

Health care, social assistance and retail jobs continue rebounding, too. But in a worrisome sign, construction, manufacturing and information all cut substantial numbers of jobs last month.

Some prominent Oregon employers have continued cutting jobs in recent weeks, among them Nike, animation studio Laika and Portland ad agency Wieden+Kennedy. Precision Castparts, one of Oregon’s largest companies, has laid off 10,000 worldwide this year as orders for its aerospace products collapsed.

The ongoing coronavirus recession has been particularly hard on the unemployed because of Oregon’s struggles in paying benefits.

Tens of thousands of people are still waiting for their checks as the employment department wrestles with a huge volume of claims and an obsolete computer system that has utterly failed to keep up with the demand and is too rigid to adapt to recent changes in the benefits program.

Additionally, $600 in bonus payments for unemployed workers ended last month. Congress is deadlocked over whether to extend the payments, leaving hundreds of thousands of Oregonians in limbo with sharply reduced benefits.

This article was originally published by the Oregonian/OregonLive, one of more than a dozen news organizations throughout the state sharing their coverage of the novel coronavirus outbreak to help inform Oregonians about this evolving heath issue.