After a quiet summer, hospitalizations from COVID-19 are going up in New Jersey, according to the most recent state data.
The number of patients hospitalized due to the coronavirus has risen more than 50% since July, according to the latest figures from the state Department of Health.
There were 225 hospitalizations across the state’s 70 hospitals on July 28. On Monday, one month later, there were 362 hospitalizations across 69 of 70 hospitals in the state.
The trend will likely continue through the fall and winter, as seen in previous years, experts said.
READ MORE: Is COVID coming back? Everything to know about recent surge
“We’ve had a relatively quiet spring and summer, as far as COVID-19 transmission and impact to our health facilities. But, there’s certainly evidence more recently, within the last six to eight weeks, we’ve seen a slowly rising level of transmission in the community,” said Dr. Jason Kessler, interim chair of the department of medicine and section head of infectious diseases at Morristown Medical Center.
Atlantic Medical Group, a network of community physician practices part of Atlantic Health System, has also seen a slight increase in COVID-19 cases at their outpatient offices, a spokesman said.
However, hospitalizations are still at a third of what they were this time last year. On Aug. 30, 2022, the state reported 1,003 hospitalizations.
Active outbreaks in the long-term care industry have also seen an upward trend. About one in four nursing homes and assisted living facilities in the state have reported an outbreak in the past week, according to state Health Department data.
On May 16, the last day NJ Advance Media reported COVID-19 cases, there were active outbreaks at 48 facilities, with 1,406 cases among residents and 607 cases among staff.
As of Wednesday, there were active outbreaks at 158 facilities, with 1,327 current cases among residents and 534 current cases among staff.
The situation in New Jersey matches national trends. The U.S. is seeing a late summer surge in COVID-19 cases, thanks to the newest highly transmissible subvariant, Eris.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there has been a nearly 22% increase in COVID-related hospitalizations and a 21% increase in COVID-related deaths recently.
Despite the uptick, there’s no expectation of lockdowns or other drastic measures. Neither Gov. Phil Murphy’s administration nor the Biden administration has issued any recent policy changes.
President Joe Biden announced an end to the national emergencies for addressing COVID-19 in early May, as most of the world returned closer to normalcy. New Jersey stopped reporting the number of new coronavirus infections on a daily basis the same month, more than three years after the state announced its first case.
The daily release of data in New Jersey was once a key facet of the state’s response to the pandemic, especially in the early days when the tri-state region became an epicenter of the crisis. In the early months, Murphy announced the numbers during live coronavirus briefings from Trenton.
But, case counts stopped being reported on the weekends and holidays in November 2022. The rate of transmission — once a closely watched metric for the spread of the virus throughout the state — was dropped from the dashboard in April.
Updates to the state’s vaccine coverage map also stopped, and the map was eliminated from the dashboard entirely in May.
As more people turned to at-home testing for COVID that did not get reported to the state, the state Department of Health removed the daily case counts tab from its COVID-19 dashboard as well. The dashboard has been updated to show lab-confirmed cases grouped by week, instead of daily case counts.
New data is now published weekly.
“Hospital information is updated daily on the dashboard at covid19.nj.gov. Case data is updated weekly and can be found under the case and mortality summaries tab. Both also provide trend data,” said DOH spokeswoman Nancy Kearney.
The type of data reported by the state has changed as the medical community shifts its focus to the impact of the virus rather than its transmission, said Kessler of Morristown Medical Center.
“That’s a subtle distinction, but an important one. That’s where we are really focusing: on number of hospitalizations, the number of deaths and the number of people that are requiring critical care. Not so much the number of cases reported, because that’s very difficult to track now because of the testing challenges,” Kessler said.
Although hospitalizations have risen slightly, the resurgence is neither surprising nor cause for major alarm, said Dr. Suraj Saggar, chief of infectious disease at Holy Name medical center in Teaneck.
“COVID is still here, it’s still an issue that we will be dealing with going forward, just like any other respiratory virus that we see with some seasonality,” Saggar said.
Except his time around, the U.S. has a “multi-layer wall of immunity” made up of people resistant to the virus from natural infection, as well as vaccines and previous boosters, which provide a layer of protection against severe disease.
The population most vulnerable to serious infection are “the very young, the very old, and the immunocompromised,” Saggar said.
“That doesn’t mean that everyone should go get COVID and it’s not a big deal,” Saggar added. “That doesn’t discount that some people can get very devastating and life-altering consequences of COVID, even a mild case.”
Just like with the flu or respiratory syncytial virus, known as RSV, “our best protection now is gonna be a seasonal vaccine,” said Saggar.
A rollout of new vaccines is expected in September, according to officials with the Food and Drug Administration and the CDC.
“People may be ‘over COVID,’ but COVID is not done with us,” said Saggar.
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Jackie Roman may be reached at [email protected].
