New York businesses last month added 45,400 jobs last month and the state's unemployment rate fell from 6.6% to 6.2% in December, the state Department of Labor on Friday announced. 

But the state's jobless rate continues to lag behind the rest of the country, and is far from recovering the jobs lost in the initial weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic. Nationally, the unemployment rate in December stood at 3.9%. 

Still, the state's jobs growth last month was slightly faster than the rest of the country. New York's private-sector jobs count grew by 0.6%; the nation's grew as a whole by 0.2%. 

New York City, which saw a sharp rise in COVID-19 cases amid the spread of the highly contagious omicron variant, continues to lag the state overall. The city's jobless rate fell slightly last month from 9% to 8.8%. 

The city's tourism and hospitality sectors have been hit hard by the pandemic, and overall New York state lost about 2 million jobs during the initial weeks of the pandemic. The state so far has recovered about two-thirds of the jobs last nearly two years ago.