This weekend, more than a year into our COVID tribulation, state health officials confirmed New Jersey has lost ground over the last few weeks in the fight of our lives with what appears to be a virus that is mutating with variations that could be both more contagious and deadly.

According to the New York Times COVID tracker, a dozen New Jersey counties are in the top 60 counties out of the nation’s 3,143 counties in terms of the rate of spread of COVID with Monmouth County having the dubious distinction of ranking 25^th in the nation.

Before this latest plateau and spike New Jersey had recorded 866,000 cases, or almost ten percent of the state’s 8.8 million residents have had a run in with the disease that has killed more than 24,000 people. We know, depending on which peer reviewed medical study you consult, that as many as one in three people who have had a bout with the virus will have some longer-term health issues of varying severity.

As of Saturday, our state had the single highest day total for new cases in two months. Sunday saw 2,599 new cases and 40 confirmed COVID deaths. Our state’s seven-day average is over 3,300 cases, an 11 percent spike from the previous week.

With the help of an engaged Biden administration, New Jersey is making progress on achieving Gov. Phil Murphy’s goal of getting 70 percent of the state’s adults vaccinated. We still have a long way to go, with just 15 percent of the state is fully vaccinated with another 28 percent with their first dose.

But the CDC warns that medical experts still don’t know to what degree vaccination short circuits the asymptomatic transmission of the virus to others. That means that even after we get the vaccine, we have to continue following the basic protocols like wearing a mask and social distancing, practices that still remain controversial and are being officially dropped in states like Texas.

On March 21, the New York Times reported that “even with the accelerated pace of vaccinations, worrisome variants are spreading” even as Governor Murphy and his fellow state chief executives “are starting to relax restrictions” in restaurants and movie theaters. “The path ahead-and public guidance about how people should behave in this moment—seems uncertain even contradictory,” reported the Times.

This most precarious moment comes while in a parallel universe Gov. Murphy is running for re-election and operating for a prolonged period of time under the breathtaking authority of executive orders he invoked under the New Jersey’s Civilian Defense and Disaster Control Act, originally put on the books after the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

The scale and scope of Gov. Murphy’s actions were as sweeping as one might expect from a wartime President but in this case, they were invoked to fight an invisible enemy that nationally would claim more lives than the 405,399 American soldiers who died in WW II.

In the months that followed, citing the unprecedented public health crisis posed by COVID, Gov. Murphy ordered the shuttering of thousands upon thousands of small businesses that he deemed to be non-essential. For many businesses, especially in the restaurant and hospitality industry the impact of his orders remains to this day, Great Depression like.

“The number of businesses open March 3^rd relative to Jan. 2020 was down almost 33 percent. Leisure and hospitality where hardest hit where that number is almost 50 percent,” testified Michele Siekerka, president of the New Jersey Business and Industry Association, before a March 19 hearing convened via zoom by Republican state legislators led by Republican State Senator Joe Pennacchio and Assembly Minority Leader Jon Bramnick.

Siekerka’s non-profit advocacy group represents employers of all sizes who employ a million people. In a survey of her members in the business sectors designated “non-essential” she reported almost half reported that it would “take over a year or maybe never” to recover the profits lost during their prolonged closure.

NJBIA CEO warned that the crisis was still unfolding with 59 percent of the businesses surveyed reporting that had survived only by cutting staff. “And then there this very scary statistic of the 72 percent who offered health insurance in 2020, 28 percent said they would have to discontinue that coverage in 2021 because of the cost.”

According to Marilou Halvorsen, with the New Jersey Restaurant and Hospitality Association, “what started as a public health crisis is now an economic crisis” with only 30 percent of the state’s restaurant workers back to work.

“Unfortunately, New Jersey has seen some of the highest COVID numbers but still has the strictest restrictions while other states, even neighboring states in the Northeast, are more open but their COVID numbers are lower than ours,” Halvorsen said, adding that the state’s policies could have pushed “people into less safe private settings.”

John Harmon, president of the African American Chamber of Commerce of New Jersey, testified that it was “projected over 40 percent of Black businesses” would be claimed by the prolonged closures that accompanied the pandemic.

Harmon but the pandemic economic fallout in the broader context of the African American population that includes 1.2 million New Jersey residents.

“We have the highest poverty rate, highest unemployment, low media income and our net worth is about $5,900 versus whites around $309,000,” Harmon said. “You can just imagine how devastating the COVID 19 impact is from a health perspective given the systemic underlying health conditions; high blood pressure; heart disease and diabetes many of my brothers and sisters have as part of their makeup.”

During the hearing the panel also heard from small business owner Darlene Pallay, who owned an exercise gym franchise in Franklin, Sussex county for ten years. She testified about how the “confusion, lack of planning by the entire government” during the pandemic left her to “fend for herself.”

Pallay described how with every new edict out of Trenton, she scrambled to comply only to fall further and further behind in her bills, leading to her eviction from her place of business by her landlord. Now, the married mother of three, whose husband lost his job in December, is facing the loss of her health insurance and her home.

Pallay is a plaintiff in a lawsuit that makes the case that under the state’s Constitution and the law that Gov. Murphy invoked during the pandemic she, like all the other businesses deemed “non-essential”, deserve compensation.

“This story has been replicated thousands if not hundreds of thousands of times across this state in the last year,” testified Robert Ferguson, one of Pallay’s lawyers. “As a result of her compliance [with Murphy’s orders] her business closed permanently, and Ms. Pallay lost her livelihood.”

In Pennacchio’s opening remarks he said the exclusively Republican roster for the zoom hearing “was not by choice” noting that his efforts at fact finding had been dismissed by Democrats “as a nakedly political election era stunt.”

“Many of us, including myself, are still willing to give the administration the benefit of the doubt and avoid criticizing those early actions closing our state’s businesses because of the initial fog that this COVID pandemic created,” Pennacchio said. “However, we must add that with times and the changing dynamic of this disease were adjustment to businesses done in a timely fashion?”

Pennacchio wondered how it could be reconciled that New Jersey had strict closures of the economy with the Star Ledger’s reporting that “if New Jersey where a country we would have the highest COVID per capita death rate in the world.”

A year plus into the pandemic, and months into the Governor’s exercise of his emergency powers, Pennacchio said the legislature was obligated to ask “was science applied to the administration’s actions? Why were certain businesses chosen as winners and certain businesses losers?….Why were big box stores permitted to stay open and smaller Main Street stores forced to close? What was the thinking and the data in all of those decisions?”