The state’s unemployment rate ticked up from 7.7% in December 2020 to 7.9% in January 2021, New Jersey labor officials said, as the state begins to slowly reopen and more people reenter the workforce.

Data released by the New Jersey Department of Labor on March 15 showed that the state added a total of 900 jobs to the economy in January. But the addition of more people looking for work pushed up the jobless rate, labor officials said.

Nearly half of the jobs lost during the pandemic were regained between April and December last year, according to the state labor department, or a total of 352,00 positions.

When Gov. Phil Murphy ordered mass closures of businesses where people congregate – restaurants, malls, casinos, gyms, theaters, indoor entertainment, salons and non-essential retail – unemployment shot up from 3.7% in March 2020 to 16.3% the next month.

It rose even further to an all-time record-high unemployment rate of 16.8% in June, outdoing unemployment surges seen during the Great Recession and Superstorm Sandy.

All told, more than 2 million New Jerseyans have filed for unemployment over the past year. The majority of those filings were in the weeks immediately following those mass closures.

But January’s unemployment rate does ultimately not reflect the mass rollback of business restrictions: indoor dining and other indoor businesses expanded from 25% to 35% capacity in February, followed by 50% capacity as of March 19.

February labor data is scheduled to be released on March 25.

According to state labor data, the leisure and hospitality sector saw the biggest job growth month over month with 4,100 new positions, followed by finance with 3,900 new positions. Transportation, trade and utilities shed the most jobs, with 7,100 less people on the payroll.

“Everybody expects 2021 to be a much better year than 2020. Unfortunately, New Jersey’s labor market numbers were rather downbeat in January,” said Charles Steindel, the former state’s chief economist, in a March 15 statement from the right-leaning think tank Garden State Initiative.

“[C]learly there is a long way to go until we get to something like full employment,” Steindel continued.

Murphy has maintained this month that “if it weren’t for the variants, I think we would be moving aggressively sooner” with reopenings.

“We don’t want to lurch out there and have to go back,” hence a more “incremental” reopening.

A permanent state reopening is contingent on the success of widespread vaccine efforts. State health officials are aiming to have 4.7 million New Jersey adults vaccinated against COVID-19 by some time in June.So far, 1 million adults have been fully vaccinated.

And President Joe Biden has promised that the nation could return to a large semblance of pre-pandemic normalcy by the July 4 Independence Day weekend.