Testing capacity

Murphy: Testing capacity must double before New Jersey can reopen

By SAM SUTTON

New Jersey will need to at least double its testing capacity before state officials can consider reopening major components of the economy, Gov. Phil Murphy said Monday during his daily coronavirus press briefing.

The state’s 70-plus testing sites are completing between 7,000 and 9,000 swabs per day, most of which then must be processed at commercial labs that require as long as a week to deliver results, Murphy said.

Before New Jersey can lift the stay-at-home order Murphy signed a month ago, effectively shutting down the state, testing capacity will need to climb to between 15,000 and 20,000 a day with 24-hour turnarounds on results, the governor said.

“I’m not marrying myself to 15,000 or 20,000 either. That’s a bare minimum,” Murphy said, later adding that he expects to roll out a broad blueprint within the next several days for how the state could begin to reopen its economy. “We’ve got to be in a completely different place in the next four to six weeks.”

Murphy and state Health Commissioner Judith Persichilli have both said for weeks that New Jersey lacked adequate testing resources, thus limiting health officials’ ability to document the spread of the coronavirus across the state.

New Jersey is among the states hardest hit by the pandemic, which has claimed the lives of at least 4,377 residents and infected almost 90,000 since early last month.

Data collected by the state Department of Health over the last two weeks suggests the growth rate in new cases is flattening. However, absent mass testing, an untold number of mildly symptomatic or asymptomatic individuals have gone untested.

“What we don’t have is [data on] everyone at home with mild or moderate symptoms who are positive Covid-19,” Persichilli said on April 6. “We will probably never get tests on [those individuals].”

While the state has slowly ramped up its testing capacity over the last several weeks — at the outset of the crisis, New Jersey’s public health lab was only capable of processing a few dozen tests per day — it is still well behind what will be necessary to plan a reopening, Murphy said.

With hospitalizations and deaths linked to Covid-19 beginning to trend in the right direction, some conservative leaders have begun pushing for reopening parts of the state’s economy.

Sen. Michael Doherty (R-Warren), a movement conservative, has issued statements in the last week calling on Murphy to allow religious ceremonies to commence and for certain businesses to reopen. A caravan of protesters gathered in front of the governor’s office in Trenton late last week in defiance of the stay-at-home order.

On Monday, Murphy reiterated he won’t be able to rescind the order unless the federal government begins making more tests available to states and provides additional resources to assist in contact tracing, which will help reduce the likelihood of new hot spots developing after social distancing standards are relaxed.

That will require more support from Washington, Murphy said.

Over the last week, President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence began pressuring states to expand testing in the hopes of accelerating an economic turnaround.

Pence told “Fox News Sunday” the administration expects the current rate of 150,000 tests per day can be increased to 300,000 per day by "working with governors to activate all of the laboratories in their states around the country that can do coronavirus testing."

While Murphy has largely refrained from criticizing Trump or Pence, and has gone out of his way to compliment the administration’s responsiveness to New Jersey’s requests for supplies, “with the greatest respect, we don’t see it that way as it relates to testing,” he said Monday.

“There is not, as far as we can tell, plenty to go around,” Murphy said. “We’ve turned over every stone here.“