More than five weeks after ordering New Jersey residents into a near-lockdown to slow the spread of the coronavirus, Gov. Phil Murphy will unveil his plan Monday to start rolling back those restrictions.
On Sunday night, Murphy tweeted a logo touting “The Road Back: Restoring Economic Health through Public Health" with the promise of more details at a noon briefing in Trenton, when state officials will also detail the latest status of the outbreak that has infected 109,038 and killed 5,938 New Jersey residents.
“Our #COVID19 response has been guided by the simple truth that public health creates economic health,” Murphy said in the tweet. “The road back will be driven by data, science, and common sense.”
Murphy has previously referred to the plan as a “broad blueprint” and warned last week that it would likely lack firm dates. Instead, the plan is expected to outline specific benchmarks including declines in cases or hospitalizations, expanded testing capacity and contact tracing that would trigger the gradual unraveling of the lockdown.
While Murphy has deferred when asked specifics about the strategy after promising the blueprint early last week, New Jersey residents can take some hints from the reopening plans offered Sunday by New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo.
New Jersey, New York and five other neighboring states have committed to a regional approach to reopening. Earlier this month, New Jersey, New York and Connecticut jointly reopened marinas and boatyards.
Cuomo on Sunday said construction and manufacturing jobs that represent low risks for workers will be among the first to resume once New York state begins reopening after the coronavirus shutdown. He set a tentative date of May 15 to start reopening, but that would depend on hospitalization rates declining for two weeks.
As of Sunday night, New Jersey had 6,407 patients being treated in hospitals for coronavirus or with suspected cases, the lowest in at least three weeks. That’s also down 23% from the peak on April 14 of 8,293 patients and marked the sixth consecutive day of declines.
Cuomo said retail jobs and workers in the hospitality and hotel industry may be among the last to return, but Cuomo also didn’t rule out the potential for baseball to return to New York this summer under certain conditions.
The stages of the reopening plan would follow stages with a two-week pause in between, he said.
“I don’t want to just reopen. We learned a lot of lessons here, painfully,” Cuomo said. “How do we take the lessons we learned and say when we reopen, we’re going to be the better for it? It’s not about a return to yesterday. There is no return to yesterday in life.”
Schools in New Jersey and New York are closed at least through May 15. It appears unlikely that Murphy will address whether to extend school closures during Monday’s road map. He has repeatedly deferred those questions until closer to May 15 and said he’s reluctant to finish the school year with online instruction.
While Cuomo said on Sunday that he’s considering different reopening dates with more rural parts of New York, Murphy said during an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” that he was still considering whether reopening would occur statewide or within sub-regions.
“While we haven’t made a decision on that, we’re going to move as one state, recognizing you’ve got density issues in the north that you just don’t have in the south," Murphy said.