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Essex County Politics · May 10, 2022 3:46 AM
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LILO H. STAINTON, HEALTH CARE WRITER | MAY 10, 2022
NJ Spotlight News
July 29, 2021: This image is an updated representation of the novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) and is representative of all current variants.
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New Jersey’s COVID-19 indicators are trending in the wrong direction — upward — due to a highly transmissible variant of the coronavirus and dwindling public health protections here and across the nation.
Daily diagnoses and likely COVID-19 cases are at a point not seen in New Jersey since late January. And hospitalizations — a key measure of health care capacity — have been rising for six weeks, state records show. Nine out of 10 cases diagnosed in the past month are tied to the omicron subvariant BA.2, also known as the “stealth variant,” which spreads even faster than its highly transmissible parent strain.
New Jersey is clearly not alone. Nationwide, cases are up 50% in the past two weeks, with the greatest increase in the Northeast. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention community COVID-19 map shows “high” and “medium” spread throughout New York state and New England, with the northern two-thirds of New Jersey considered “medium” while southern counties remain in a “low” spread zone.
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Posted by
Essex County Politics · May 06, 2022 3:24 AM
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TAYLOR JUNG | MAY 6, 2022
NJ Spotlight News
May 5, 2022: The U.S. Supreme Court behind a fence that was erected this week
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The leaked draft opinion out of the U.S. Supreme Court that would overturn Roe v. Wade continues to draw strong reactions across New Jersey and the country, and it’s not just about abortion rights.
The draft written by Justice Samuel Alito on behalf of an apparent majority of the court calls for the end to federal abortion rights that were written into law for the last half-century. He argues instead that they must be decided by individual states.
Yet in his wording, Alito also appears to take aim at other rights that previous courts have deemed constitutional.
“Roe, however, was remarkably loose in its treatment of constitutional text,” Alito wrote. “It held that the abortion right, which is not mentioned in the Constitution, is part of a right to privacy, which is also not mentioned.”
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Posted by
Essex County Politics · May 05, 2022 3:08 AM
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TAYLOR JUNG | MAY 5, 2022
NJ Spotlight News
For New Jersey school psychologist Norma Reyes, not having to make her student loan payments the last two years has been a “blessing.” While the Biden administration pushed back payments to the end of August and is expected to make a student loan announcement in the coming weeks, the looming and unclear future of her debt is unsettling.
“However, those loans are still there. And it’s very scary for me to know that they’re still there, and to know, OK, what is going to happen when (payments start) over again? So even though it’s been a nice little honeymoon, at the same time I am very afraid of what’s going to happen when I start paying,” said Reyes.
Reyes said the last time she was quoted on a federal loan payment, she was told her payments would be $2,000 per month. When Reyes graduated from Fairleigh Dickinson University with a bachelor’s and master’s degree in 2013, she owed over $100,000 in federal and private student loans, most of which came from graduate school. She owes more now than she did then because of interest, and her debt caused her to put off buying a house and having a family, Reyes said.
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Posted by
Essex County Politics · May 04, 2022 2:58 AM
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LILO H. STAINTON, HEALTH CARE WRITER | MAY 4, 2022
NJ Spotlight News
May 3, 2022: Demonstrators protest outside the U.S. Supreme Court after the leaking of a draft majority opinion suggests the court is poised to overturn the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion nationwide.
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Access to abortion remains a “fundamental right” for anyone present in New Jersey, state officials underscored Tuesday, regardless of the U.S. Supreme Court’s intention to overturn the decision known as Roe vs. Wade.
But that doesn’t mean abortion is easy to access in New Jersey or will be in the future. The costs involved can be high — even for insured patients — and abortion providers are scarce, especially in rural areas, health advocates said. And state lawmakers could tweak or reverse these statutory protections in the future.
New Jersey’s law technically enables women from out of state to obtain abortions here, but experts noted that requires those women to have resources, like child care and travel money. If Roe v. Wade is overturned — as a draft Supreme Court opinion leaked late Monday suggests — women and children are at higher risk for sickness and death, they said, and poor and minority women suffer most. New Jersey is already struggling to address significant racial disparities in health outcomes, particularly when it comes to maternal mortality.
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