INSIDE: Los Angeles County's economic rebound from the pandemic is crucial for California.

California needs its biggest job market to catch up to the rest of the state as it thaws from a coronavirus-chilled economy.

Los Angeles County has been a huge drag on the state’s overall recovery that has, by several measures, been well behind the national pace.

Consider: L.A. County’s unemployment rate was 11% in April, compared with 4.7% in February 2020, just before the pandemic hammered life and business. That’s a stomach-churning 6.3 percentage point increase — even after 2021’s economic uptick.

Now look at the rest of California. My trusty spreadsheet calculates unemployment in 57 other counties at 7% in April, vs. 4.2% just before coronavirus hit. That’s just a 2.8-point jump.

In the 12-county Bay Area region, unemployment was 6% in April, vs. 3.1% 14 months ago.

California’s “official” reopening Tuesday should provide L.A. County — home to 1 in 4 workers statewide — a huge opportunity to return its economy to somewhere near its pre-virus status.

L.A. County’s sharp underperformance in the pandemic era largely can be tied to its strict mandates that throttled many businesses and shuttered numerous others. Another factor is the county’s heavy reliance on industries that were smacked hard by the pandemic.

Just ponder Hollywood’s plight.

Economist Mark Schniepp says the L.A. region averaged 1,435 days of TV and movie filming per month in 2019. From April to June 2020, as coronavirus fears were soaring, there were just 55 shoot days. Conditions haven’t improved much. The industry is still down 60,000 jobs.

It’s a good bet many L.A. businesses will flourish with the elimination of operational shackles — those created by the government and consumer skittishness.

“L.A. will bust out and recover fast,” says Schniepp, director of the California Economic Forecast. “Tech is doing extraordinarily well. Film and TV are coming back