Governor doesn’t expect normal start of summer season at Jersey shore
By DAVID NAHAN/Sentinel staff
Gov. Phil Murphy said he wants nothing more than to see “the shore humming throughout the summer” along with Main Streets filled with shoppers and construction sites across the state “roaring.”
To that end Monday, he offered a six-step “The Road Back” economic recovery plan for New Jersey, but Murphy offered no exact timeline for the first four steps to be in place to start the economic recovery. One hint was when he said the state hoped to get to step two – the necessary expanded testing – by the end of May, which appears to put local Jersey shore Memorial Day openings in question.
Even when the state does start to reopen, the governor expects social distancing measures to continue, such as face coverings and work-from-home directives for employees who don’t need to report to a physical location.
Murphy also said the first businesses and industries and activities that will be open “are not only essential to our economy, but which provide the lowest risk of disease transmission.” What that means for shore communities that fill with crowds in the summer was unclear.
“I don’t have a crisp answer on Memorial Day,” Murphy said, responding to a question at his press conference. “I know what it normally is and I love it and I hope it can be some form of that. Memorial Day is four weeks from today and I can’t give a full answer. I hope … we have some semblance of norm at the shore this summer, but it will be some semblance. I just don’t envision being in tight spaces without real restrictions on capacity and social distancing and frankly even on the beach. I don’t see it.
“Whether we’re at a better place four weeks from now, I sure hope we are. I think we have a shot if everybody keeps doing what they’re doing. If we let our guard down, all bets are off,” he said.
“I’ll be the happiest guy in Jersey, if not America, if that semblance comes in by Memorial Day,” Murphy said. “I worry about out-of-state stuff. I want us to be open for business. The good news is folks who travel to New Jersey on the shore and rent or own a second home, are overwhelmingly New Jerseyans or from the region.”
Whether from New Jersey or out of the region, the governor said as of this week, he still wants people to be at their primary residence.
“The shore community, particularly in the off-season, does not have the health care infrastructure to support the challenges this virus has put upon us,” Murphy said.
The Road Back
The Road Back plan outlined by the governor has six steps, the first four of which must be met to get the economy going.
The six steps are:
- 1. Reduced cases of COVID-19, hospitalizations and other factors reflecting a decreased burden on the health care system.
- 2. Expanding testing capacity and speeding up the return of results.
- 3. Robust contact tracing.
- 4. Ensuring safe places for those positively diagnosed in the future can isolate.
- 5. Responsible economic restart.
- 6. Ensuring resiliency.
“Once we have accomplished these (first) four steps, we can move to principle number five, responsibly restarting our economy to restore our economic health,” Murphy said. “And finally, to secure our future, we move to principle number six: ensuring our resiliency.”
As he has repeated over and over, Murphy said the state would be guided by one principle only, that “public health creates economic health.”
“Before we reopen non-essential stores and businesses, before we can reopen our parks, or before we can allow in-person dining in our restaurants, among any host of other activities, people need to know first and foremost that their health … will be safeguarded from COVID-19,” Murphy said.
“We can announce a vision to put our people and our state on the road to recovery, but there is still much work to do. If we let up with our aggressive social distancing too soon, even a day too soon, we can easily see ourselves skidding off this road.”
Step 1: Reductions
The state will be looking at 14-day trend lines to determine if there are sustained reductions in new cases and hospitalizations and other metrics showing a decreasing burden of the disease and hospitals stepping down from functioning under crisis standards of care.
The state will be looking at 14-day trend lines, not snapshots, to determine that.
Step 2: Testing
The state has to at least double the current capacity of COVID-19 testing with a priority for health care workers, essential personnel and vulnerable populations. It has to be a flexible testing plan in expanded partnerships with higher education institutions, private-sector labs and the federal government.
“We are actively working toward doubling our testing capacity by the end of May and having everything in place from the kits themselves to the lab capacity necessary to ensure quick turnaround of results,” Murphy said. “It’s not just the number of tests, but how fast you get them back.”
There also must be flexibility for all residents who need testing to be able to get it from walkup facilities to labs to at-home testing.
The governor said the state also wants to be prepared for “targeted surveillance testing” in case of new surges of the virus.
Step 3: Contact Tracing
The governor said they need to recruit and deploy an “army” of personnel to track everyone who comes into contact with a person who has tested positive for COVID-19. He said that could mean 1,300 to 7,000 workers, but that number could be lower if they team up with new technologies for tracking cases.
Step 4: Isolation
There must be safe and free places set up for those who test positive where they can isolate to protect others. The governor said they know there will be new cases of the virus when the economy restarts so there must be locations for those affected to be isolated to prevent new cases from multiplying.
Step 5: Restarting the Economy
Murphy is forming the Governor’s Restart and Recovery Commission this week with economists, academics, business leaders, labor leaders and health care experts among them.
Their task is to “balance multiple competing needs to ensure we arrive at equitable decisions that work for every community in our state.”
He offered a chart showing how different aspects of the economy will be restarted.
The highest priority, “using clear standard of essential and safe,” begins with businesses and industries and activities “which are not only essential to our economy, but which provide the lowest risk of disease transmission. Then we can move up the matrix bringing others … online until we achieve a fully functioning and open economy.”
He did not specify which businesses, industries and activities those would be.
Step 6: Resiliency
“We cannot think of COVID-19 as a one-and-done,” Murphy said. Officials need to learns the lessons of what has happened so far, make sure health care systems have inventories of PPE (personal protective equipment) and ventilators, to build its own state stockpile and create a playbook for future administrations.
“I don’t know when we’ll be able to formally and finally start this journey,” Murphy said. “Hopefully, if we all keep at it, it will be soon … We will be ready to put the car in gear as soon as we see a green light. This is a plan for how we move forward, not if we move forward, so let’s do it together.”
The governor added there has been no decision on whether to keep schools closed after May 15, but that he would announce the status of schools by that date.
He said the stay-at-home order will remain in effect until further notice.