TRENTON, NJ – New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy is a numbers guy. After a long career on Wall Street, Murphy brought his lust for numbers, data and statistical analysis to Trenton when he was elected Governor. Since the COVID-19 pandemic began, Murphy and his administration flooded the public with data on a daily basis. Each day, he would deliver the COVID-19 pandemic by the numbers.
Except, when it’s just a week before election day and the state passed the 25,000 death milestone, it was simply one line of a tweet. On Friday, Murphy quietly tweeted in his daily update that New Jersey had reported 25,018 cumulative deaths from COVID-19.
On Saturday, the New Jersey Department of Health COVID-19 dashboard reported 25,038 deaths.
Milestones are usually a good thing, except when that milestone is COVID-19 deaths in a state that had and still has some of the strictest COVID-19 healthy and safety guidelines in America. New Jersey is also the most vaccinated states in America.
One of the phrases Phil Murphy stopped pushing recently was, “This is a pandemic among the unvaccinated.”
Earlier this week, Murphy reported 36,616 cases of COVID-19 among the state’s 5.6 million fully vaccinated residents. 794 fully vaccinated individuals required hospitalization from the virus and 215 have died.
While the majority of the cases in New Jersey are indeed among the unvaccinated, the current state of the pandemic is no longer a “pandemic amongst the fully vaccinated”.
The good news is despite reaching the 25,000 death milestone, cases in New Jersey are once again trending downward due to the COVID-19 vaccine and the natural waning of the delta variant. That variant makes up over 99% of the total outbreaks and the original strains of COVID-19 have all but been eliminated in New Jersey.
The rate of Transmission in New Jersey is now at .89, meaning less than one other person is infected by COVID-19 for each infected person.
Phil Murphy and his administration remain under investigation for their role in a nursing home outbreak that killed hundreds and possibly thousands at the start of the pandemic.