N.J. reports 20,428 COVID cases, 12 deaths. Hospitalizations surge to 4,700 patients after holidays. – NJ.com

New Jersey on Monday reported another 12 confirmed COVID-19 deaths and 20,428 confirmed positive cases, while the number of hospitalized coronavirus patients across the state jumped above 4,700 in the wake of the winter holidays — marking an increase of 76% in only a week.

Gov. Phil Murphy addressed the state’s ongoing surge during his latest COVID-19 briefing, held virtually a day after his office announced his wife, First Lady Tammy Murphy, tested positive for the virus. Murphy said he has tested negative three times in the last six days.

The Democratic governor announced he’s asking the Democratic-controlled state Legislature for a 90-day extension of some of his remaining pandemic emergency powers set to expire next week on Jan. 11. That includes the authority to keep the statewide mask mandate in schools, as well as his administration’s oversight of vaccine and testing distribution.

”This omicron tsunami has changed the game yet again,” Murphy said as he hosted his first briefing in two weeks. “We cannot summarily give up the fight. We need to remain on a war footing to ensure that we can get resources to where they need to be, when they need to be there.”

Murphy stopped short of announcing or calling for any new statewide restrictions Monday, though he repeated that officials must “keep all options on the table.”

He also encouraged local governments to implement their own orders “based on the local reality.” Numerous municipalities have imposed new business and mask mandates and many school districts have switched to all-remote classes in recent weeks.

And Murphy said officials “currently have no intention or plan to shut our schools” and “no desire to return to remote learning” statewide.

“We will do everything we can to keep our kids in schools where not only we know they will have a more appropriate educational experience but where the data actually shows they can be kept in an overall reality safe,” he added.

• MORE: Gov. Murphy seeking extension of COVID emergency powers as cases, hospitalizations spike
• MORE: Kids in N.J. schools may have to continue to wear masks as Murphy seeks to extend mandate

The Garden State’s seven-day average for new confirmed positive tests increased to 23,391, up 91% from a week ago and 836% from a month ago. That’s the highest average New Jersey has seen in the 22-month-old pandemic.

The state has recorded six consecutive days of more than 20,000 confirmed positive tests.

Murphy stressed the surge in daily cases may not represent the full extent of the current outbreak because most people are testing positive through at-home test kits that are not reported to local health officials.

“So look at this number as a floor,” he said.

There were 4,715 patients with confirmed or suspected COVID-19 cases across New Jersey’s 71 hospitals of Sunday night. That’s the most since May 7, 2020, when the initial wave of the pandemic was starting to ease. Hospitalizations have more than quadrupled in the last month.

New Jersey is also seeing it’s highest number of pediatric COVID-19 hospitalizations, with 102 children in hospital beds as of Monday, state Health Commissioner Judith Persichilli said. That number has doubled over the last week, Persichilli said.

Officials say hospitalizations are the more important metric to watch because only a portion of people who catch the virus develop severe cases. The goal, officials say, is to prevent hospitals from becoming overstressed and running out of space to care for patients.

Patient numbers haven’t climbed to the heights they did in the early days of the pandemic, when there were more than 8,000 people hospitalized in the spring of 2020. But increases in patients typically follow a week to 10 days after surges in case numbers.

“When we are seeing case counts as high as we are, and knowing the real number is much higher, whatever solace we get from a lower hospitalization rate goes out the window,” Murphy said. “The sheer numbers of new cases are directly leading to hospitalization figures we have not seen in well over a year.”

The statewide positivity rate for tests conducted on Thursday, the most recent day available, was 32.2% — meaning nearly 1 in 3 people who sought a test that day got a positive result. The positivity rate has been above 30% since Christmas Day. New Jersey has not had positivity rates hovering around 33% since April 2020.

The state has reported record highs in daily cases multiple times over the last two weeks. The latest record was 29,740 positive tests announced on Saturday. Previously, the state’s single-day record was 6,922 cases on Jan. 13, 2021, in the early days of vaccine rollout.

Officials said a combination of factors are contributing to the surge: people spending more time indoors because of colder weather, both the delta and omicron variants of the virus spreading across the globe, people traveling for the holidays, and more people getting tested before and after holiday gatherings.

The state does not issue daily breakdowns of the vaccine status of those who test positive, are hospitalized, or died because of the virus.

But Murphy said Monday unvaccinated residents “continue to be the primary driver of the numbers of hospitalizations and deaths,” accounting for roughly 70% of those being being hospitalized in New Jersey. Still, he added, infections among fully vaccinated people have been rising, accounting for more than a quarter of new infections over the week of Dec. 13-19.

During that week, the state reported 44,481 positive tests. Of those, 12,453 were from fully vaccinated people, and those cases led to 17 hospitalizations (out of 1,804 total) and 1 death (out of 136 total).

As of Dec. 19, New Jersey has reported a total of 91,896 breakthrough cases among fully vaccinated people, leading to 1,682 hospitalizations and 401 deaths, though those represent a small percentage of total cases.

Officials say vaccinated people are less likely to contract the virus and much less likely to develop life-threatening cases. But officials are calling on more people to get booster shots because the effectiveness of vaccination wanes over time.

Murphy said his wife’s positive test shows the omicron variant is “crazy transmissible” because she is fully vaccinated, boosted, and practices other precautions.

“Don’t underestimate how easily you can get infected from this thing,” the governor said.

But Murphy also noted his wife has no symptoms.

“If you do the right thing — if you’re double-vaccinated, you’re boosted, you do everything in accordance to the guidance we know works — you may get it because it’s so crazy transmissible. But, God willing, you don’t get sick enough to be miserable, or worse yet, go to the hospital, or worse yet, get really sick or maybe even die,” the governor added. “Get vaccinated, get boosted. That’s the best, smartest thing you can do.”

There are early signs that while the omicron variant is much more transmissible, it may cause less severe symptoms and require fewer hospitalizations than previous strains.

The state does not break down how many of the new cases are from the delta or omicron variants. But for a seven-day period ending Dec. 25, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated about 58.6% of all new cases nationwide were from the omicron variant. In New Jersey, omicron accounted for 8% of cases sampled Dec.-11, according to the most recent state data.

CORONAVIRUS RESOURCES: Live map tracker | Newsletter | Homepage

There are caveats to the record explosion in cases. Officials note that testing was less widely available during the first months of the pandemic, making it difficult to compare periods.

Testing is now far more available, even though there have been long lines at testing sites in recent weeks. The state reported a record high 116,480 PCR tests conducted Dec. 27, in the wake of the Christmas holiday weekend. During the surge in cases last winter, the state had just two days — Dec. 20, 2020 and Jan. 11, 2021 — with more than 90,000 tests administered.

But it‘s undeniable New Jersey’s COVID-19 case and hospitalization numbers have been trending in the wrong direction over the last several weeks.

HOSPITALIZATIONS AND TRANSMISSION RATE

The 4,715 coronavirus patients hospitalized across New Jersey as of Sunday night marks 441 more patients than the night before. That’s despite 461 patients being discharged during the 24-hour period that ended at 10 p.m.

Of the people hospitalized, 644 were in intensive care (57 more than the previous night) and 284 were on ventilators (14 fewer than the previous night).

The state’s hospital numbers could peak between 6,000 and 9,000 patients around Jan. 14, Persichilli said Monday.

She also said the state has asked the Federal Emergency Management Agency to send reinforcements for health-care workers in New Jersey who can’t work because they have tested positive.

“Staffing is likely going to be our biggest constraint here,” Murphy said.

New Jersey’s statewide transmission rate, which indicates whether the pandemic is growing or shrinking, dropped to 1.74 on Monday. It was 1.77 on Sunday and 1.92 on Saturday. If it reaches 2.0, it will indicate every infected person is passing the virus along to two people.

All of New Jersey’s 21 counties are listed as having “high” rates of coronavirus transmission, according to the CDC. The agency is recommending that all people in high transmission counties wear masks for indoor public settings regardless of vaccination status.

VACCINATION NUMBERS

More than 6.4 million, or 74%, of the 8.6 million eligible people who live, work or study in New Jersey have been fully vaccinated and more than 7.3 million (or about 85%) have received a first dose since vaccines began here on Dec. 15, 2020.

More than 2.27 million, or 46% of the 4.95 million people in New Jersey eligible for boosters, have received one.

“This number is not going up as fast as we either want or need,” Murphy said.

Anyone 16 and older in the U.S. who has received their second dose of the Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines at least six months ago is eligible to get a booster shot. Anyone 16 and older who received the Johnson & Johnson vaccine is also eligible for a booster two months after their single shot. In most situations, the CDC said, it recommends the Pfizer and Moderna boosters.

TOTAL NUMBERS

New Jersey, an early coronavirus hotspot, has now reported 29,073 deaths — 26,218 confirmed deaths and 2,855 probable deaths — in the nearly 22 months since the pandemic began here. The probable deaths, which are revised weekly, increased Monday by six fatalities.

The state has the third-most coronavirus deaths per capita in the U.S., behind Mississippi and Alabama.

New Jersey has reported 1,418,352 total confirmed cases out of more than 16.5 million PCR tests conducted since the state’s first case was announced on March 4, 2020. The state has also reported 226,486 positive antigen or rapid tests, which are considered probable cases.

SCHOOL AND NURSING HOME NUMBERS

Cases continue to rise among school staff and students in New Jersey, according to numbers released before schools went on winter break that track infections regardless of where the transmission occurred.

For the week ending Dec. 26, with just 28.8% of schools reporting data (down from 61%), another 7,125 confirmed cases were reported among staff (1,973) and students (5,152).

Since the start of the academic year, there have been 48,690 students and 12,008 school staff members who have contracted COVID-19, though the state has never had more than two-thirds of the school districts reporting data in any week.

The state provides total student and staff cases separately from those deemed to be in-school transmission, which is narrowly defined as three or more cases linked through contact tracing.

At least 8,772 of the state’s COVID-19 deaths have been among residents and staff members at nursing homes and other long-term care facilities, according to state data. There were active outbreaks at 439 facilities, resulting in 3,189 current cases among residents and 5,842 cases among staff as of the latest data.

GLOBAL NUMBERS

As of Monday, there have been more than 290.5 million COVID-19 cases reported across the globe, according to Johns Hopkins University, with more than 5.4 million people having died due to the virus. The U.S. has reported the most cases (more than 55.2 million) and deaths (more than 826,100) of any nation.

There have been more than 9.2 billion vaccine doses administered globally.

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Brent Johnson may be reached at bjohnson@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter at @johnsb01.