US appears to shake off Omicron and adds nearly half a million January jobs

Workers at San Francisco airport. The unemployment rate remained low overall at 4%, down from a pandemic high of 14.8% in April 2020. Photograph: John G Mabanglo/EPA

The US economy appeared to shake off the Omicron variant in January as employers added 467,000 new jobs, the labor department reported on Friday.

Data for the report was collected in mid-January when the Omicron variant was at its peak in the US. While some economists – and the White House – had predicted a dramatic slump in jobs growth, the number of jobs added was far better than expected.