New year, new data as New Jersey continues its battle with the novel coronavirus.
Monday marked 10 months to the day that New Jersey confirmed its first positive coronavirus case, Gov. Phil Murphy noted at his first coronavirus news conference of 2021.
New Jersey on Monday, announced not only daily PCR test-confirmed COVID-19 cases, but began sharing positive antigen tests to its total number as well.
With 2,292 new PCR positives and another 822 positive antigen tests, more than 494,000 positive PCR cases and nearly 51,000 positive antigen cases have been reported during the pandemic, Murphy said.
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Murphy announced 38 new confirmed coronavirus deaths Monday. Since the start of the pandemic, 17, 223 deaths are confirmed to be due to coronavirus complications, with another 2,021 deaths suspected to be due to the virus.
The rate of positivity on New Year's Eve was 11.22% while the latest rate of transmission was 0.92, showing a slowing down of the virus' spread, Murphy said. More than 3,600 people were hospitalized with the virus in New Jersey -- more than 600 were in intensive care.
Murphy noted that more than 100,000 people -- health care workers and those in long-term care -- in the state's 1A vaccination level are confirmed to be vaccinated with a first dose as of Monday. The state has thousands of more doses that still need to be administered.
"Our job is to protect every life we can, in any way we can," Murphy said. "Be it through maintaining our practices of social distancing and wearing our face masks, or getting vaccinated when the time comes. We can do this. We must do this together."
Some schools have changed from in-person and hybrid models coming out of winter break due to virus concerns.
State health officials and Murphy said they are still prepared for more cases in the days to come due to Christmas and New Year's gatherings. It could be mid January before that surge is seen due to virus' incubation period.
