Most NJ COVID Patients Admitted For Non-COVID Reasons, State Says

NEW JERSEY — At his press conference Monday, Gov. Phil Murphy announced that New Jersey currently has 6,075 people hospitalized with COVID.

However, when pressed by a reporter, the state's Health Commissioner Judith Persichilli further revealed that 2,963 of that number were actually hospitalized because their main illness is coronavirus.

Everyone else simply tested positive while in the hospital for another reason.

Of that 2,963 who are hospitalized because of coronavirus, about 70 percent of them either received one vaccine shot or did not receive any vaccination, said the Department of Health.

With a population of about 8.8 million people in New Jersey, this means that 2,963 or .03 percent of the state is currently sickened with COVID seriously enough to be hospitalized.

"With about 6,000 individuals in our hospitals with confirmed COVID positive tests, about 2,963 of them are in with a principle diagnosis of COVID, which means it’s the reason for the admission, the reason for the hospitalization," said Persichilli on Monday.

Similarly, there are 82 children, or those under 18, hospitalized with COVID-positive tests right now. But of those, 27 children were admitted specifically because of coronavirus, said the health commissioner.

Gov. Murphy said he has started calling it "incidental COVID."

"I think we have a fair number of what I’ve started to call incidental COVID, meaning you went in because you broke your leg, but everyone is getting tested. It turns out you’ve got COVID. You didn’t even know it," said Gov. Murphy. "My wife didn’t know it and still she’s not back in the game, but never had any symptoms."

Another reporter further pressed Murphy, asking if people could be brought into hospitals with "a broken leg, car accidents" and then be counted as COVID-positive cases.

The health commissioner said that was accurate.

"Half of them have a principal — what they call the principal diagnosis so the main reason for being admitted," continued Persichilli. "The other half, on the other hand, are testing positive for COVID. COVID then becomes a contributing or comorbid condition that could or could not worsen their principal diagnosis, their principal reason for being admitted."

"If you’re admitted to the hospital with cardiovascular problems, and you have a – you’re COVID positive, that maybe adding to the problems that you have. It’s not as clean cut as half and half," she said.

She did say that of those who are hospitalized because of coronavirus, about 32 percent of them are fully vaccinated and 68 to 70 percent of them are either unvaccinated or are partially vaccinated.

This week is the first time New Jersey has surpassed more than 6,000 hospitalized with the virus since April 2020.

Murphy stressed that many of those people who are hospitalized directly because of coronavirus are in serious condition. New Jersey had 474 people on ventilators statewide as of Sunday, a sharp increase from when that number was 61 on Nov. 9.

The governor then added that he knows of someone who died of a heart attack but he thinks that man's COVID-positive diagnosis contributed to his death.

"Our team, in fact, knows someone not on our team, but someone who is in a circle of friends who in fact died of a heart attack, I think, last week at the age of 40. It turns out he had COVID. The conclusion, at least according to the — our team member, is that it was a contributing factor to that. You can’t parse it. The answer is yes, it’s about 50/50, but that doesn’t mean the other 50 percent are — to use an old phrase, hunky dory. These things feed on each other in terms of the conditions," he said.

Last week, on Jan. 7 New York state Gov. Kathy Hochul said in this press release something similar, that nearly half of the patients currently in New York state hospitals with COVID-19 were admitted for reasons other than the virus.

On Jan. 7, Hochul said that 11,548 people were in the hospital and were COVID positive, and that 43 percent of them, or 4,928 cases, had been admitted for a reason entirely other than coronavirus.

The health commissioner said the state will continue to see high coronavirus case positives for at least the next few weeks, which she clarified was just a prediction.

You can watch the Governor's Q&A with the media where he reveals this; it starts at minute 35 with the question from a reporter:

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