A recent surge in coronavirus cases is rekindling economic anxieties in North Dakota, where wildly fluctuating oil prices and recent drops in production threaten to leave the state’s finances in fresh disarray. Six months after it registered its first confirmed infection, roughly 80 percent of North Dakota’s drilling rigs remain offline and thousands of local workers are still out of a job, cutting deeply into the state’s ability to refine oil and mine hundreds of millions of dollars from the natural resources that flow deep within its borders.

For months, low oil prices have contributed to the slowdown, as a global decline in demand made it financially unfeasible for refiners in North Dakota to continue tapping new wells. Another blow came Tuesday: an unexpected 7.6 percent dip in U.S. benchmark prices that sent economic shock waves worldwide.

The dual economic and epidemiological shock now facing the state has created new uncertainty for its residents, workers, businesses and government leaders, some of whom once seemed optimistic that they had weathered the worst of the pandemic.

“The onset of [coronavirus] and the complete crushing of the world demand for oil had a very dramatic effect, one frankly we’ve never seen before,” said Ron Ness, the president of the North Dakota Petroleum Council.

A history of austerity and recent efforts to diversify its economy mean North Dakota may not be the worst-off among states reeling from the pandemic even as its infections climb. But its struggles illustrate the wide-ranging nature of the worst U.S. economic crisis since the Great Depression — a massive downturn that has left no corner of the country unscathed.

Unlike other states, North Dakota has eschewed stay-at-home restrictions and other tough mandates since the pandemic began. It never shut down whole swaths of its economy, and it never mandated masks in public settings to stop the spread of the coronavirus. Doug Burgum, the state’s Republican governor, instead has pleaded for local residents to take precautionary steps — at times lamenting that North Dakotans wouldn’t follow enforceable rules even if he issued them. His office declined to make him available for an interview.

This summer, North Dakota’s case counts have started to tick up, particularly in the western part of the state. The July 4 holiday — and the more recent return of some students to their classrooms — have driven some of North Dakota’s climbing positivity rate, said Doug Griffin, chief medical officer at Sanford Medical Center in Fargo. So have nearby events, including the motorcycle rally that brought nearly half a million people to Sturgis, S.D., last month, a potential major source of new infections throughout the Midwest.