- There have been less than 200 COVID deaths in New Jersey since Christmas, far below the 2,300 deaths reported last year.
- Overall cases remain down too, but it’s hard to know how many never get reported because the symptoms are mild.
- One Rutgers professor says we should all be wearing N95 masks in public, but the Murphy administration has not brought up the idea of mask mandates again.
The holiday season — which a year ago slammed the Garden State with COVID-19 hospitalizations and deaths — has caused only a slight uptick in reported cases of the virus this year, but risk and transmission levels remain high statewide, and there might be more cases than the data are showing.
Since Thanksgiving, COVID cases and hospitalizations have been on the rise in New Jersey, after health experts had warned that travel and indoor gatherings would cause a spike.
And the state did see an increase in reported cases, but nothing compared with this time last year. In January 2022, New Jersey reported more than 2,300 COVID deaths, the highest one-month total since the earliest periods of the pandemic, according to data from the Health Department’s COVID-19 Dashboard. In comparison, since this most recent Christmas, COVID-19 confirmed deaths are less than 200.
Hospitalizations are drastically down from last year, too, according to the department. There are almost 73% fewer COVID-related hospitalizations now compared with the beginning of 2022, when hospitalizations hit over 6,000 in mid-January. The number of patients on ventilators is down about 87%.
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Some people are putting on face masks again this winter, but they have not been mandated by the state, and many people skip them entirely.
Donna Marie, 52, of Asbury Park, is on the fence about masks, but said she wears them on public transportation. She’s a hair stylist, so she’s cautious about not servicing clients who are infected, but there’s nothing else she avoids out of fear of getting sick.
“I think that we’re all going to get it,” she said.
According to Sally Malech, spokesperson for RWJBarnabas Health, that health system has seen a steady number of admissions in Monmouth and Ocean counties over the past few weeks, but still has capacity and availability in the facilities. The system owns Monmouth Medical Center in Long Branch, Monmouth Medical Center Southern Campus in Lakewood and Community Medical Center in Toms River.
“There was a slight increase in early January,” she said. “Most of the patients with COVID-19 do not need hospitalization.”
Since the beginning of December, the state has reported about 88,000 new cases, compared to the almost 700,000 new cases reported during the same period last year.
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‘More people are protected’
According to Nancy Kearney, a spokesperson for the state Department of Health, the large spike in cases and hospitalizations in 2022 can be attributed to the highly transmissible omicron variant, the fact that the weather was getting colder and people were congregating indoors.
“In 2023, many more individuals have had the vaccine or natural illness or both,” she said. “Thus, more people are protected from the currently circulating strains.”
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Since vaccines first became available in New Jersey in December 2020, the state has administered nearly 20 million doses, according to the Department of Health, including primary series and boosters. Approximately 23% of those were given between Christmas 2021 and now.
About 7 million New Jerseyans are fully vaccinated, according to the department, which says that unvaccinated individuals have four times the risk of getting COVID and being hospitalized than those who are fully vaccinated. “Fully vaccinated” is defined by the state Health Department as having one shot in the single-shot series (Johnson & Johnson) or both shots in the two-dose series (Moderna and Pfizer).
In New Jersey, there are over 850,000 individuals above the age of 5 who are unvaccinated, Kearney said, and 345,000 children below 5 who are unvaccinated due to age ineligibility.
The subvariants are still circulating, though, and Kearney said the department is continuing to urge people to get the updated booster and the flu vaccine for further protection.
By the first week of 2023, all counties across the state fell under the “high” category in terms of risk and transmission, according to reports from the Department of Health, with Atlantic, Essex, Morris, Somerset, Sussex and Warren having increased from the “medium” level they were at two weeks prior.
Under the department’s guidelines, people in counties at this level should be wearing a “high-quality mask or respirator” when indoors in public, and those at high risk for severe illness should “avoid non-essential indoor activities” where they could be exposed, even though the case numbers are seemingly low.
So far, Gov. Phil Murphy’s administration has not suggested a return to mask mandates. Last month, the governor said that while mandates remain an option, he doesn’t see a return of mask mandates unless “something dramatically changes.”
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‘The potential for more disease’
The XBB 1.5 — a subvariant of the highly contagious omicron variant — accounts for over 80% of cases in Region 2 of the county, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which includes New Jersey, New York, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands.
Dr. Stanley H. Weiss — a professor of medicine at the Rutgers New Jersey Medical School and a professor of biostatistics and epidemiology at the Rutgers School of Public Health — said that there is great cause for concern. Not only are subvariants like XBB 1.5 incredibly infectious, but they’re also evading therapy.
“If you don’t have protection from the vaccine — even the bivalent — (and) you don’t have protection from getting any of the immunoglobulins, then the potential for more disease and spread is clearly there right now,” Weiss said.
Though the risk of infection is extremely high, the benefit to getting the bivalent vaccine, he said, is that clinical data still suggests it makes cases milder.
Weiss said that he believes there are two reasons why cases appear to be down amid such a contagious variant: a lag in statistics and a lot of mild cases.
“The fact that some of the numbers were leveling off was good news, but this information about the variants … is very worrisome,” he said.
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Because the COVID-19 of today is more than 1,000 times more infectious than the original strain of three years ago, Weiss said that people’s current precautions are not enough, and that even the CDC is out of date in terms of masking guidelines.
Weiss — who said he and his family consistently wear masks in indoor public spaces — believes that the whole concept of masks needs to be reintroduced. While many cases are mild, he said, if the total number increases, the number of severe cases will increase, too. Plus, children under 5 can’t get the bivalent vaccine, so they’re at risk from both adults and other children.
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“I will point blankly say, that unless you have an N95 or KN95, well-fitting mask … that you do not have adequate protection against these variants,” he said.
Additionally, Weiss said masking helps protect against co-infection — which likely increases the risk of more severe disease — of things like the flu and RSV.
Andrea Harris, 60, of Point Pleasant Beach, believes that masks are still important in protecting against COVID, though she doesn’t wear them all the time. In a crowded environment, she’ll put one on.
“I still think [COVID is] something that’s serious,” she said. “I think it’s something we’re going to have to live with for the rest of my life, and maybe my daughter’s life.”
Three years after the start of the pandemic, she doesn’t feel the need to go to crowded bars as much anymore.
“I’ll try to figure out when I can meet at places that are larger, bigger, more open,” she said.
Prior to these latest variants, those who got the bivalent vaccine were protected against more serious illness and had a decreased risk of long COVID, Weiss said. The risk of long COVID — symptoms that persist after the initial recovery — that these new variants present is not yet clear.
So, are new vaccines coming?
“I’m sure the companies are all working on it,” Weiss said. “I would shocked if we don’t have a new version of the vaccine sometime in the coming months, but at the moment, I recommended getting the bivalent vaccine if someone had not yet gotten it.”
The bivalent COVID-19 vaccine — also referred to as the “updated” vaccine booster dose — includes a component of the original virus strain as well as a component of the omicron variant, according to the CDC.
To date, almost 20% of those eligible, or over 1.3 million people in New Jersey, have received the bivalent vaccine, Kearney said.
Weiss said our region is the place everyone worldwide is watching as omicron dominates.
“I, like everyone else, am so frustrated that COVID hasn’t just gone away,” he said. “But it’s clearly still with us and it’s still evolving rapidly in nefarious ways that we need to be concerned about.”
Jenna Calderón covers breaking news and cold cases in Monmouth and Ocean counties. Before coming to the Press, she covered The Queen City for Cincinnati Magazine in Ohio. Contact her at 330-590-3903; jcalderon@gannettnj.com
