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.
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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.