Under the measure, the 2.5 percent “health insurance assessment” on health insurance company’s “net written premiums” would generate $200 million to subsidize small businesses and individuals buying their own health plans.

Gov. Phil Murphy extended the state’s public health emergency on Aug. 1 for another 30 days, as a resurgence of COVID-19 prompts him and state health officials to consider reinstating restrictions meant to keep the virus in place. Under state law, the public health emergency has to be renewed every 30 days; it applies to ...

Gov. Phil Murphy, when pressed on how much the state has used, assured that most of the funding had either been allocated or spent.

“We are standing in a very dangerous place,” the governor said July 31 in Trenton. “The alarms are going off.”

“While the city has a temporary open container order in place now, to implement it permanently could completely transform Atlantic City’s Tourism District,” said Sen. James Beach, the sponsor of a measure cleared by the Legislature this week.

The measure, approved by the Legislature on July 30, would assume that applicable essential workers who contracted the virus did so while on the job.

Under the measure, local governments could acquire bonds for up to 30 percent of their budget, backed by local property tax revenue and payable over a decade.

Murphy is likely to sign the measure, which would go into effect on Jan. 1, 2021, replacing an identical federal levy – part of the Affordable Care Act – that expires that same day.

As of July 30, another 28,000 residents filed for unemployment, marking more than 1.44 million who’ve applied since the COVID-19 pandemic slammed into the state and the Northeast in mid-March.

Republicans from the Senate Budget and Appropriations Committee sent a letter to State Treasurer Elizabeth Maher Muoio contending state officials inflated the numbers to justify a $9.9 billion borrowing plan and to win over additional federal relief from the Trump administration.

The state logged roughly 2,000 new cases of the virus in less than a week, according to Gov. Phil Murphy, and crowded house parties with attendees in their teens and early twenties are largely to blame. The numbers also have officials considering revisiting the metric used to determine which locations travelers coming into New Jersey should self-quarantine from, which currently stands at 36.

A suggested decrease from $600 to $200 under a proposed COVID-19 federal relief package introduced by Republican lawmakers this week could upend state systems, like New Jersey's, already pushed to the limit and struggling to catch up with mounting claims.