Florida has now recovered over 960,000 of the around 1.3 million jobs lost at the height of the COVID-19 outbreak, according to state authorities. The Florida Department of Economic Opportunity (DEO) said in a recent release that the state has recovered 964,400 jobs of those lost when the pandemic struck last spring, which threw the economy into a tailspin and led to a sharp rise in unemployment. Jerry Parrish, chief economist at the Florida Chamber of Commerce, said the Sunshine State economy now remains just over 315,000 jobs down compared to the pre-pandemic period. “We still have a few to go to get back to the pre-COVID peak of more than 9 million non-farm jobs” in Florida, Parrish said in a video presentation that’s part of the August edition of the chamber’s monthly overview of the latest jobs figures and other economic data. Around two-thirds of the jobs that have yet to …