In addition to respirators and face masks, US state governments are now in dire need of COBOL programmers to assist during the global pandemic. New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy recently called for volunteers to code the decades-old computer programming language because many state systems still run on older mainframe computers. Explaining that many New Jersey systems are out of date during a coronavirus briefing, Governor Murphy said, "We literally have systems that are over 40 years old. There will be a lot of post mortems and one of them on our list will be how we got where we literally needed to be." COBOL programmers?" Kansas Governor Laura Kelly said state labor departments were upgrading their COBOL systems before the coronavirus epidemic began. The lack of COBOL programmers is also hurting Connecticut because the state is currently struggling to process its high volume of unemployment claims using a COBOL mainframe and four other separate systems. New Jersey is facing a similar situation: 362,000 state residents have filed for unemployment in the past two weeks, and its 40-year-old mainframe computers are now overloaded.