Hours after meeting with President Donald Trump at the White House, Gov. Phil Murphy said Thursday that New Jersey will receive hundreds of thousands of pieces of personal protective equipment and coronavirus test kits from the federal government.
The Trump administration will ship PPE — which New Jersey has struggled to procure — to 358 nursing homes in the state, Murphy said, including 220,000 masks, 19,000 goggles, 200,000 gowns and 1 million pairs of gloves. The virus has struck particularly hard in the state’s nursing homes.
In addition, the federal government will provide 550,000 new Covid-19 test kits and 750,000 swabs, which Murphy said will allow the state to conduct about 20,000 tests per day, more than twice the number that are now being performed.
“This is a tremendous boost to our overall testing capacity,” Murphy said during his daily briefing in Trenton. “And as I have noted many times already, having a robust testing program is not just a key thing in the here and now, but a key principle for us being able to get back on the road to recovery."
“This proves it is possible to put people over politics,” Murphy said. “We need the federal government as a partner in our restart and recovery just as they have been in our mitigation. At every stage, this has been a team effort, and there’s no reason for that to stop now, especially as we approach the time when we’re going to need our partners the most.”
Murphy said he told Trump during the White House meeting that the financial hit to New Jersey from Covid-19 would be $20 billion to $30 billion, but did not directly address how the state arrived at that figure. The “estimate,” he said, was a combination of expenses and major revenue losses.
Trump would not commit during the meeting to providing federal aid for states, saying it was a “tough question.”
Still, Murphy said, the two had a “good discussion” and the president’s answer was “far from a heck no.”
“It’s no secret that the president and I disagree on some things,” Murphy, chairman of the Democratic Governors Association, said of his meeting with the Republican president. “But that’s not going to stop me from doing everything I can to make sure New Jersey has all the resources we need to move forward.”
Murphy also announced during his daily briefing that the state Department of Corrections will begin universal testing for inmates and staff by the end of next week, and that NJ Transit employees will also have access to testing at various sites throughout the state.
Murphy has said that the state’s economic reopening is contingent on the development of mass testing regimes and the ability of state health officials to contact trace and quarantine those who test positive moving forward, a process that will likely take weeks to develop.
On Tuesday, Murphy announced the members of a Restart and Recovery Commission who will advise his administration on New Jersey’s recovery efforts. He has not indicated when he will begin to relax restrictions on businesses or the public, although he has announced that golf courses as well as state and county parks will reopen on Saturday.
New Jersey has faced the second-worst coronavirus outbreak in the nation after New York. On Thursday, Murphy announced 2,633 new cases of Covid-19, bringing the statewide total to 118,652 since the first case was reported in early March. The state also reported 460 deaths — the largest one-day toll thus far — bringing that total to 7,228. More than 3,370 of the deaths have been at the state’s long-term care facilities.
The past week has seen a 15-percent drop in patients hospitalized for Covid-19. As of 10 p.m. Wednesday, 6,137 people were hospitalized with the coronavirus, the lowest number the state has recorded since April 2, Murphy said
Health Commissioner Judith Persichilli said hospitalizations peaked around April 13 or 14, when about 8,200 Covid-19 patients were being treated.
Of the patients hospitalized, 1,765 remain are receiving critical or intensive care and 72 percent, or 1,271, are on ventilators — a number that‘s remained relatively flat, Persichilli said.
source https://www.politico.com/states/new-jersey/story/2020/04/30/murphy-after-meeting-with-trump-says-new-jersey-will-get-ppe-test-kits-from-feds-9422789
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