Coronavirus outbreaks occurred last week in 13 of New Jersey’s 21 counties, including Ocean County, which led the state in the development of the disease.
Ocean County added 9.1 new infections per 10,000 inhabitants from September 16 to September 23, an increase of 52% over the previous week. This was followed by 7.3 new infections per 10,000 people from Gloucester County and 5.1 new infections per 10,000 people from Monmouth County.
All three counties have seen a bunch of new cases recently, and all three were released by Governor Phil Murphy and his administration on Friday as potential hotspots overseen by the government. That’s when New Jersey has done better than the entire United States, with 6. new cases reported per 10,000 inhabitants in the state, compared to the national rate of 1.1 new cases per 10,000.
Murphy pointed out in a news briefing specifically to Ocean County that the state has sent additional contact tracers and more than 20,000,000 coronavirus test kits.
“This is clear evidence that we are not out of the woods yet,” Murphy said.
A state official has complained that housing parties in Monmouth County have accelerated the spread of the virus there. Ocean and Gloucester have recently seen coronavirus positivity rates that would put passengers on New Jersey’s 14-day contagion list if they were the state.
Being disastrous this spring, New Jersey is slowly reopening when the epidemic first hit the country. More than 16,000 New Jersey residents, believed to have died in the outbreak, began learning to die in April and are now regularly in the single issue every day.
Still, the disease spreads to New Jersey. The number of new cases increased by 12% from the previous week, with only eight counties seeing a decrease in the number of new cases.
That includes Gloucester, which also had a new infection rate earlier this month, while Sept. From 9 to September, there was an increase of 9.7 cases per 10,000 people. Salem.
Along with Monmouth and Gloucester counties, state officials have turned their attention to social gatherings as the driver of the new caseloads, at Rowan University in Gloucester and tied to on-campus student housing.
In Ocean County, 100 to 150 cases a day are on the rise, and at least half of them are in Lakewood, said Health Commissioner Judith Persichili.
Lakewood is the county’s largest township and is home to a large Orthodox Jewish community that now observes the high holy days of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. Its public school system includes people in New Jersey who have resumed full-time classroom instruction.
On Friday, Murphy said he was convinced there was a “slight connection” between the increase in cases and religious worship, which pushed back against those who drew a biased conclusion from it.
Murphy said, “I don’t want anyone, I don’t want anyone’s impression, this state says, ‘Hey, it’s because of them,’ or anything,” Murphy said.
The state has already sent additional contact tracers to Ocean County, and Persicili said more will be done next week. She praised the cooperation of Lakwood’s religious and community leaders, saying she had just made a phone call asking, “What more can we do?” And “How can we cooperate?”
“They have the same interest as anyone else in protecting the community they are serving,” Persicili said.
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