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New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy has warned ‘we’ll be having a long, hot summer’ if the wave of Covid-19 infections hitting the state worsens, but the federal government does not appear to be taking action immediate to send additional doses of vaccine in its own way.
More young people are hospitalized with coronavirus infections, but New Jersey has not started giving vaccines to residents under 55, as neighboring New York and other states are doing, even though 18 68% of the state’s population has already been fully vaccinated, according to Becker’s Hospital Review.
“As April approaches, we expect the federal government vaccine allocations to increase rapidly,” Murphy’s deputy press secretary Alexandra Altman said Thursday via email. “When we have enough supplies from the federal government, anyone who wants a vaccine will be able to get one.”
New Jersey will actually receive more doses each week, a White House official said. But it will be the same for all other states.
The Biden administration is increasing the number of pharmacies offering the vaccines so that 90% of people in the United States are within 5 miles of a vaccination site, the official said. And this week, the government is opening a mass vaccination site capable of delivering up to 6,000 doses per day in Newark on the campus of the New Jersey Institute of Technology.
But the government will continue to base the number of doses states receive on the population, not on infection rates or other data, the official said.
New Jersey, like all other states, should follow the recommendations of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and identify hot spots, redouble mitigation efforts, and consider moving vaccine supplies to parts of the world. State that need it most, the official said.
New Jersey had the 12th highest infection rate in the country on Thursday, according to Becker, and it averaged about 4,400 new cases and just over 2,000 hospitalizations per day.
The state on Thursday reported 4,699 new cases of coronavirus and 30 more deaths from Covid-19.
Murphy and top New Jersey health officials on Wednesday released models for how the pandemic could play out, including a worst-case scenario that shows Covid-19 infections and hospitalizations are increasing up to mid-May before peaking at around 8,000 new cases and around 3,600 daily hospitalizations. .
In this terrible forecast, the numbers stay at that level for about a month before gradually dropping to around 6,000 infections and 2,700 hospitalizations per day as of August 1.
“In this scenario, we are having a long, hot summer,” Murphy said at a press conference Wednesday. “So please, my God, this is not what we have to go through.”
More likely, Murphy said, the current wave will peak in mid-April with about 5,500 new infections and 2,700 hospitalizations per day. And by the end of July, the numbers for that model would drop to daily counts of 2,500 infections and 1,200 hospitalizations.
Worryingly, the highest number of confirmed cases in a single day was not recorded at the start of the pandemic in March 2020, according to NJ Spotlight News, which has kept a continuous tally of Covid-19 data in the state. . That was less than three months ago, January 13.
New Jersey was one of the hardest hit states at the start of the pandemic, and it continues to have the highest per capita Covid-19 death rate, with 24,562 dead, according to latest NBC figures News.
Most of them died in the first months of the pandemic, as epidemiologists were still trying to figure out how Covid-19 was spreading. Public health experts praised Murphy, a Democrat, for imposing early lockdowns and communicating effectively with his constituents, including those who resist wearing masks and social distancing, which he called the ” knuckleheads ”.
New Jersey’s latest wave of Covid-19 began to pick up after Murphy, under pressure from a pandemic-exhausted public and business community, began easing restrictions to slow the spread of the virus at the same time where the vaccine rollout began this year.
“We are in a new model,” said Ning Zhang, a health policy and services researcher and professor at the Seton Hall-Hackensack Meridian School of Medicine. “In March, we started to see more young people hospitalized, and the # 1 reason is the relaxation of national and municipal policies regarding indoor and outdoor gatherings.”
Reason No. 2, said Zhang, is the weather.
“It’s getting hotter and more people are going out,” he said. “In other states it’s a good thing because it spreads more slowly outside, but New Jersey is an overcrowded state. The population density is high. Even if they go out, they will collide to other people. “
Third, New Jersey, like other states, has prioritized vaccinations for the elderly and nursing home residents, “and you can see the effectiveness, as their infection and death rates go down.” Zhang said. “But it’s the younger ones who are spreading the virus, and they haven’t been vaccinated.”
Finally, as was the case across the country, New Jersey residents were lulled into a false sense of security when the vaccine rollout began, Zhang said.
“A big part of the problem is the state of mind of the people,” he said. “They consider that we are safe because a lot of people are vaccinated. But they are not sure. It takes a while for the vaccines to be effective, and we have not yet achieved herd immunity.”
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