The jobs report for L.A. County for January by state officials had hefty doses of good news and bad news.

First the bad news: The county’s unemployment rate rose to 7% in January from 6.8% in December as a combination of seasonal factors and the Omicron Covid surge forced county employers to slash a whopping 75,000 jobs from their payrolls, according to the March 11 report.

Now the good news: That unemployment rate of 6.8% reported for December was revised significantly downward from the original estimate of 8.4%, thanks to an annual benchmarking revision from the state Employment Development Department. So even though the January rate rose to 7%, that was still substantially lower than the original December figure.

And there was more good news: That same massive revision effort turned up 95,000 more payroll jobs in L.A. County in December than originally reported. That means the large seasonal and Covid-related January drop of 75,000 jobs still left the county payroll job tally slightly ahead of what was originally reported for December.

Similar upward revisions were reported on a statewide level.

“California’s labor market performed more impressively in 2021 than original estimates had suggested,” said Taner Osman, research manager at Westchester-based Beacon Economics.

Osman noted that typically, these annual revisions show greater job gains than initially reported during periods of economic recovery and greater job losses than initially reported during recessionary periods. Given these trends, this most recent upward adjustment was somewhat expected.

For Los Angeles County, the biggest chunk of these “discovered” jobs in December – 31,000 – was in the county’s signature industry: motion picture and sound recording. Other sectors with significantly higher job totals than previously reported included food services/drinking places (up 19,800) and professional/scientific/technical services (up 14,600).

While fewer sectors reported revisions that translated into job losses, there were two significant ones: social assistance (down 12,100 jobs) and local government (down 11,700).

These revisions also meant the county has climbed further back from the huge pandemic lockdown-induced job cuts of March and April 2020 than reported just a month ago. The county has gained 569,000 jobs – or 73% – of the 778,000 in job cuts recorded in those two lockdown months two years ago; prior to the adjustment, those figures stood at 537,000 jobs and 70%, respectively.

This largely upbeat series of revisions for December was nearly eliminated by the dismal January figures. Eleven of the county’s 12 major industry sectors reported drops in payroll jobs in January from December, led by a seasonal drop in professional/business services of 19,000 jobs. The leisure/hospitality sector recorded a drop of 13,400 jobs, in large part because of the Omicron Covid surge and the resulting reinstatement of mask mandates. And the motion picture/sound recording industry saw a drop of 5,600 jobs between December and January.

The state also released a seasonally adjusted payroll jobs figure that takes into account the ending of the holiday hiring period. That seasonally adjusted figure showed a gain of 12,000 jobs, which is a sharp trend reversal from the unadjusted drop of 75,000 jobs.