Hospitalized patients in New Jersey who have tested positive for COVID have surpassed 1,000 again for the first time since February and most of the state is back to seeing high rates of transmission as a new mutation continues to spread quickly, data from the state Department of Health shows.
But administrators at some of the biggest hospital networks said Tuesday that most COVID patients have relatively mild symptoms and are being sent home with medication.
“We’re not seeing a huge amount of people being admitted for COVID like we did in the winter,” said Deborah Visconi, president and CEO of Bergen New Bridge Medical Center in Paramus, the state’s largest hospital. “They’re being admitted for other conditions, but they test positive while they’re here.”
The latest COVID surge is being driven by the highly transmissible omicron BA.5 subvariant, which makes up about 82% of all positive cases in New Jersey and New York — up from 64% less than two weeks ago. BA.5 has so far been shown to evade some of the protections that natural immunity and current vaccines offer — so much so that federal health officials have asked vaccine manufacturers to update their formulas to address the newer variant.
As of July 21, all counties except Mercer, Gloucester and Cumberland had high levels of transmission, a big change from just two weeks earlier, when most of the state was seeing medium levels. And the number of cases is likely undercounted, since the vast majority of positive cases found via in-home rapid tests are never reported to health authorities.
The RWJBarnabas network has about 200 patients with COVID at its 12 hospitals, a jump from 50 in March but a far cry from 1,000 in January during a heavy surge caused by the omicron variant.
“It’s definitely drifting in the wrong direction,” said Dr. Andy Anderson, chief medical officer for RWJBarnbas. “But overall people have been less sick than they have in the past, and that’s because New Jersey has a very high vaccination rate. So there’s no question that it’s spreading, but we’re not seeing the same level of severe illness.”
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The number of COVID patients in intensive care was 106 as of Monday night, and 42 were on ventilators.
The last time New Jersey saw more than 1,000 hospitalized patients test positive for COVID was Feb. 21. But at the time, the numbers were free-falling from a high of 6,089 on Jan. 11 during the initial omicron surge.
The number of hospitalized patients with COVID has been inching up since early May, but severe cases have not risen as sharply.
The vast majority of those in New Jersey’s 71 hospitals who have tested positive for COVID went in to be treated for another ailment and just happened to test positive for the virus. Of the 1,018 COVID hospitalizations on Sunday night, only 33% were admitted with a primary diagnosis of COVID.
Bergen New Bridge has seen COVID spread across its staff, with about five to six new cases a day. Employees have to isolate for five days. If they continue to test positive, they have to isolate for another five days. Visconi said the staff absences have not been as disruptive as they were in December and January, when the initial omicron surge caused widespread staff shortages at hospitals across the state.
“The lesson here is the virus is still out here,” she said. “It’s still among us. And we are seeing an uptick, definitely.”
Anderson said he hopes the surge doesn’t stop patients from seeking their regular care, whether it’s an annual physical, a cancer screening or an appointment to monitor a chronic illness.
“Our patients have slowly come back, thankfully,” he said. “We just hope it stays that way.”
