COVID Added To Vaccine Schedule, New Strains Are Here: State Of COVID In NJ

NEW JERSEY — The COVID-19 pandemic began 2.5 years ago, but things can still change quickly. In the past week, New Jersey logged its highest total of hospitalizations from the virus since early August, highly contagious strains emerged in the region, and federal health officials voted to add COVID immunization to the vaccine schedule.

Here's what that last part means: a CDC advisory committee unanimously voted Thursday to endorse the inclusion of COVID shots into the agency's recommended immunization schedule.

Nothing in the vote of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices — which is made up of public health, medical and scientific experts outside the CDC —requires that Americans get the shots.

CDC officials do think it’s a good idea for people to get inoculations against COVID, which has killed 1.06 million people in the U.S. alone since the first laboratory-confirmed domestic case was reported in January 2020. But the agency isn't requiring the vaccinations as a condition for school enrollment. That authority falls on the states.

Voices for Vaccines, a family-led vaccine advocacy group that uses peer-to-peer conversations about vaccines and the diseases they prevent, explained why the advisory committee’s recommendation matters.

"Please note: this is not how school entry requirements work," the organization tweeted. "Recommending vaccines makes them available in the Vaccines for Children program, get insurance to pay for them, and makes it easier for people to get compensated for possible injuries."

Meanwhile, two COVID variants that Dr. Anthony Fauci has called "pretty troublesome" have emerged in the region: BQ.1 and BQ.1.1. Both represent offshoots of the omicron variant, not only spreading quickly but also showing remarkable abilities to evade immunity.

In New Jersey's region, BQ.1 represented 11.6 percent of cases, while BQ.1.1 accounted for 8 percent of infections, according to the CDC's latest weekly estimates. (The CDC's most timely data for variant proportions is regional. New Jersey's region also includes New York, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.)

COVID By The Numbers In NJ

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

For the third straight week, New Jersey had no counties showing high community levels.

Only two counties changed from the prior week's map: Bergen and Passaic Counties went from low to medium levels.

The CDC's mask recommendations do not trigger any mandates in New Jersey. People may also choose to continue masking in any setting.

While mask recommendations are minimal, the region's wastewater shows higher COVID levels than the rest of the nation — a figure that can indicate the virus's path before lagging indicators such as hospitalizations and death tolls. COVID wastewater levels are measured by estimated gene copies per milliliters of sewage.

In the Northeast, which includes New Jersey, wastewater samples had 1,159 copies/mL during the past week, according to Biobot Analytics, which monitors sewage as it relates to public health. The figure more than doubles the totals from all other regions — samples in the Midwest showed the second-highest COVID concentration at 545 copies/mL. See the data here.

The state's hospitalization totals crept higher this week, with 1,160 patients with confirmed or suspected COVID in hospitals as of Wednesday — up from 1,084 people one week prior, according to the New Jersey Department of Health. State officials hadn't logged that many active COVID hospitalizations since Aug. 9.

New Jersey's transmission rate remains encouraging, totaling 0.90 as of Friday, according to state health officials. A transmission rate lower than 1 indicates that each existing infection causes less than one new infection — a sign that the virus's spread is slowing down.

True case totals became more difficult to calculate in recent months because of the prevalence of at-home tests that don't typically get recorded in COVID statistics. But New Jersey's reported case totals have trended downward since late September. The state had 2,506 infections per day the week ending Sept. 25 but averaged 1,781 new daily cases in the past week, according to federal data.

Forty-three people in New Jersey died from the virus in the past week, according to the CDC. Federal officials reported about 2,400 deaths from COVID complications around the nation during that timeframe.

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.