Today the New York Times published the striking figure of US unemployment claims in light of the recent COVID-19 pandemic. I’ve always been a strong proponent distilling the essence of what I’m trying to convey in my research especially when I generate plots and ggplot allows me to do just that. When I run workshops I always mention how you can plot nearly anything with ggplot. Let’s see if we can put my claim to the test and recreate this incredible plot of the number of unemployment claims.