Half-Million Again File Unemployment Claims : Work force: The dour April figures prompted analysts to say the recession hasn’t abated.

WASHINGTON — The number of Americans filing new claims for unemployment benefits hit the half-million mark again in April as the ranks of those seeking help rose for the second straight week, the Labor Department reported Thursday.

“This is the recession biting at the personal level,” said Peter Radford, chief economist at the National Westminster Bancorp of New York.

“It’s another half a million people who lost jobs and are filing for unemployment,” added Robert Brusca of Nikko Securities. “It’s a very high number, and it’s very disturbing.”

For the week ending April 20, the number of people filing unemployment claims for the first time rose by 2,000, pushing the total to 500,000, the Labor Department reported. It followed a much steeper increase in initial jobless claims of 47,000 in the previous week, the agency said.

Analysts said the jobless claims data shows that the recession did not abate last month, although they cautioned that the number can be extremely volatile.

The Labor Department is scheduled today to release its overall unemployment figures for April. Many analysts predicted that the rate probably increased from 6.8% to possibly as high as 7%. They predicted that businesses cut 150,000 to 200,000 more jobs.

“The recession did not end in April. It is still with us. The decline has slowed, but nonetheless, the economy is still in a decline,” said Elliott Platt, an economist with Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette Securities.

The increase in new claimants reported Thursday was a relatively small weekly rise, but it marks a dramatic increase over levels from last year. For the same week in 1990, there were 373,000 new jobless claims.

In early March, claims remained above the half-million mark for two weeks in a row--something that had not happened in more than eight years.