17 NJ Counties Should Mask Up As COVID's Presence Grows: CDC

NEW JERSEY — For the past several months, the CDC left its masking recommendations to only a handful of different New Jersey counties each week. That changed Thursday, with the agency recommending that almost everyone in the state mask up for public, indoor spaces.

The CDC recommends masking in counties with "high" COVID-19 community levels — a metric based on hospitalizations and case rates that the agency adopted in late February. The agency updates its color-coded COVID-19 maps each Thursday.

Last week, New Jersey only had six counties in the high category. But the CDC's most recent map showed 17 above the threshold — all except Hunterdon, Mercer, Salem and Cumberland Counties, which remained in the medium category.

The CDC's mask recommendations do not trigger any mandates in New Jersey. People may also choose to continue masking in any setting. But the new guidance arrives as COVID transmission and hospitalization totals continue to climb in the Garden State.

BA.5 — an omicron subvariant that's become the most contagious COVID strain yet — took over New Jersey's dominant strain in recent weeks. The subvariant reflected about 64 percent of the region's COVID cases for the week ending Saturday, according to the CDC.

(The CDC separates its most up-to-date variant-proportion data into regions. New Jersey's region also includes New York, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands.)

BA.5 appears to evade immunity — including from prior COVID infections — better than past strains, meaning it could cause the number of infections to rise in the coming weeks, according to President Joe Biden's administration. But BA.5 and BA.4 — the strain that represents 14.5 percent of the New Jersey region's cases, according to the CDC — don't appear to cause more severe disease.

Health experts believe the current vaccines still work well to prevent severe illness and death. But their waning ability to prevent infections prompted the Food and Drug Administration to recommend that vaccine makers modify booster shots to target BA.4 and BA.5.

Meanwhile, the state tallied 1,031 hospital patients with confirmed or suspected COVID as of Thursday, according to the New Jersey Department of Health. That's the state's highest total since Feb. 20, when last winter's omicron surge waned.

New Jersey's transmission rate stands at 1.06 as of Friday morning, according to the state health department. A transmission rate higher than 1 indicates that each existing infection causes a new infection — a sign that the virus is spreading more quickly.

True case totals are more difficult to calculate because of the prevalence of at-home tests that don't typically get recorded in COVID statistics, but reported cases in New Jersey continue to gradually rise. The state averaged 3,636 infections per day in the past week — up from the average of 2,668 new daily cases for the week ending June 20.

While cases and hospitalizations continue to rise in the United States, death tolls have yet to spike. That's also been the case in New Jersey, where 60 people died of COVID in the past week, according to the CDC.

For more coronavirus numbers, visit the state health department's COVID-19 dashboard, The New York Times data page for New Jersey and the CDC's data tracker.