This story was updated at 7:16 p.m.

By Monday evening, Mary Ruddy knew she was formally unemployed.

The 31-year-old D.C. resident had been working two jobs, one at a downtown hotel and another at Room 11, a Columbia Heights bar and restaurant. But with the coronavirus pandemic all but drying up travel into the city and Room 11 closing its doors after Mayor Muriel Bowser shuttered all eating and drinking establishments on Monday, Ruddy’s employers had little choice but to let her go.

Ruddy says she had been laid off once before, so she knew the drill: file for unemployment benefits, tighten up on personal spending for a few months, and wait for something else to come along. But it’s unclear if and when anything else will come along this time, and how long she can pay her bills on the weekly benefits she’s expected to receive.

“If the check is only $444, I still am not able to pay my rent or student loans and things like that,” says Ruddy, who would regularly pull in more than $1,000 a week from her jobs.

The sudden spike in layoffs like Ruddy’s is posing a challenge both for workers and the unemployment benefits systems they will have to rely on in the near future.

The systems are facing an almost unprecedented spike in claims — 9,000 this week alone in D.C. To put that in perspective, there were roughly 10,000 new claims during last year’s 35-day federal government shutdown. The city’s website to file for unemployment benefits crashed repeatedly this week — and even when it worked, it is optimized for a single browser: Internet Explorer.

And when she turned to the phone, Ruddy says she spent more than four hours waiting to talk to a person. Ben Joyce, 34, the director of bar operations at Annebelle restaurant in Dupont Circle, similarly faced long wait times — but once he got through, he says the process was quick.

“[A] four hour wait to have a four-minute conversation kind of made me consider how many people are calling in right now,” he says.

“We are seeing unprecedented numbers of claims and calls and emails,” said Unique Morris-Hughes, director of the D.C. Department of Employment Services, in a conference call with business leaders on Thursday.

Maryland saw a five-fold increase in unemployment claims this week, and Virginia saw a similar spike. And claims are only likely to rise further, both because many jurisdictions are expanding eligibility and businesses are expected to keep closing. In D.C., Chief Financial Officer Jeffrey DeWitt told the D.C. Council today that unemployment could climb from the current rate of 4.9 percent to between 15 percent and 20 percent.

And though D.C.’s weekly benefits are among the most generous in the nation, they’re still barely enough to help many people cover what it costs to live in an expensive city and region. (D.C. is at $444, Maryland at $430 and Virginia at $378.) Ruddy says that while she’s happy an emergency bill passed by the Council this week prohibits evictions, it doesn’t get her off the hook entirely.

“So I can’t get evicted, but I’m still going to owe that money. And then if, like these businesses aren’t able to kind of come back strong or come back at all, then I might not have a job either. Unemployment alone would not make me able to pay my rent and pay my bills,” she says.

Joyce says he’s in a better place — he lives with his girlfriend, a consultant, and has saved up some money. But he knows his weekly unemployment check will only get him so far.

“I’m fortunate enough to be in a position where I can make things stretch for a month or six weeks or probably even eight weeks. But I’ve kind of been telling people who who aren’t in that position who were really scared, just kind of to have optimism that the city will eventually take care of us,” says Joyce.

The owners of Tail Up Goat, an Adams Morgan restaurant, are pushing for as much, urging residents and restaurant workers alike to lobby Bowser and Council to more than double the weekly unemployment benefit to $1,000 through the end of the year.

But it’s unclear whether that will happen. While speaking to the Council on Tuesday, DeWitt said the city’s unemployment insurance trust fund is in a good place — it had more than $560 million in it as of January — but the state of the current crisis could quickly imperil it. (According to the U.S. Department of Labor, D.C. and Virginia’s funds are above the minimum recommended solvency level, while Maryland is just below it.)

“That fund will need to be monitored,” he said, while also asking lawmakers to proceed carefully on what pledges they make. “Give us time to re-look at where we are before you go any further than what you’ve proposed.”

There are other possible avenues for aid, though.

D.C. has requested disaster employment assistance from the federal government, which opens up unemployment insurance eligibility to people like independent contractors who might otherwise be left out. And there’s the possibility of a massive federal stimulus or recovery package.

“It sounds like the Democrats want to push a lot of money through the unemployment insurance system,” says At-large Councilmember Elissa Silverman, who chairs the Council’s labor and workforce committee.

Still, Silverman says DeWitt’s note of caution will likely stand even if federal funds flow into unemployment.

“The more we increase the cap, the quicker we’re going to spend down the trust fund. So we want to make sure we’re judicious,” she says. “We want to help more people than give a larger amount of money to a small number of people.”

Editor’s note: This story has been updated to reflect an increase in the number of unemployment claims filed in D.C. from 7,600 to 9,000.

This story first appeared on WAMU.