TRENTON, NJ – There’s a statistic New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy won’t talk about in his daily COVID-19 press briefings and that’s the rapidly declining rate of transmission. A month ago, the state’s RT shot up to 1.5, meaning that for every person who contracts COVID-19, it is spreading to 1.5 other people.
Since then, the RT has dropped steadily, despite the increase in delta variant that now accounts for more than 98% of all new COVID-19 cases, mostly among the unvaccinated population.
This weekend, the rate of transmission dipped below 1, to .9. Today, the RT climbed back to one.
Another statistic you won’t hear Murphy mention is that all other variants of COVID-19 account for less than 2% of all cases, meaning the original strain of COVID-19 has for lack of better words, been defeated.
Murphy can’t talk about the positives of the COVID-19 pandemic, because the good news is bad for his political policy. Instead, he will focus on the 1.5% increase in new cases in the 7-day trending model. The governor also will not talk about how despite the rampant outbreak of the delta variant nationwide and the horrors going on in hospitals in Texas, the Gulf states and Florida, New Jersey still leads the nation in most COVID-19 cases per capita, despite the governor’s lockdowns, masking and business closures over the past year.
The rate of transmission was the primary indicator that gave Murphy back his pandemic powers and if the current trends continue, he could legally lose those powers in the next 30 days, but with a Democrat controlled senate and assembly and no formal mechanism in the law to strip him of those powers, we could once again be in this for the long haul.