New Jersey will join five other states in the region to put a plan together to figure out how to rebound from the coronavirus outbreak and the near-lockdown that has gripped the northeast to slow the spread, Gov. Phil Murphy announced Monday.
Murphy, noting unlike New York that New Jersey has yet to meet its apex, joined a plan to tap a health official and an economic official to join a working group designed to effectively plan how to best scale back the unprecedented restrictions put in place in the region.
“An economic recovery only occurs on the back of a complete health care recovery,” Murphy said on a Monday afternoon phone call with the other governors.
“We’re not yet there,” he said, adding, “Getting this right, both the timing (and) the infrastructure from ... both health care experts, as well as economic development experts in addition to our government colleagues, seems to me and to us to be an incredibly smart way to go.”
Murphy added: “This is the fight of our lives. Let there be no doubt about it. And we’re not out of the woods yet in reopening ourselves back up.”
Murphy was joined on the call by New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont, Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf, Delaware Gov. John Carney and Rhode Island Gov. Gina Raimondo.
“It’s one step forward after research and consultation from experts,” Cuomo said. “You take one step forward, you see how it works, and then you measure the next step."
The working group will get to work immediately, Cuomo said.
The last time Murphy made an announcement with fellow governors was nearly a month ago when New Jersey, New York and Connecticut agreed to close all movie theaters, casinos and gyms in their states indefinitely. They also placed restrictions on bars that serve food and restaurants.
Murphy also banned all public gatherings of 50 people or more in all three states. At the time, Murphy “strongly discouraging” residents from making “non-essential” travel between 8 p.m. and 5 a.m. for the foreseeable future. That was on March 16.
Since then, Murphy put much stricter orders in place to curb the spread of the outbreak. He’s signed 24 executive orders in response to the virus.
New Jersey now has at least 64,584 coronavirus cases and 2,443 deaths as the outbreak continued to escalate on Monday with about 2,700 new cases announced.
It’s difficult to get a complete picture of exactly how many people in New Jersey currently have COVID-19 because officials say testing has been backed up for up to 14 days. The state also is not reporting significant increases in daily testing, so it is unclear exactly how quickly the virus is spreading.
As of Monday morning, the virus had infected more than 1.8 million people across the globe, according to a running tally by Johns Hopkins University. Of those, more than 115,200 have died and nearly 441,000 have recovered.
