SOUTH JERSEY (KYW Newsradio) — The highly contagious Delta COVID-19 variant is responsible for a growing share of New Jersey’s coronavirus cases.
At the governor’s COVID-19 briefing on Wednesday, state Health Commissioner Judy Persichilli said the Delta variant accounts for nearly 27% of the state’s infections and trails only the Alpha variant.
“There has been a steady rise in this variant. Two weeks ago the percentage of reports doubled, and this week it nearly doubled again,” Persichilli said. “In the face of this highly transmissible variant, it is more important than ever to have high vaccination rates so our state does not slide backward.”
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Gov. Phil Murphy reported 240 new COVID-19 cases and eight new deaths in New Jersey — one day after reporting no new deaths for the first time since March 17, 2020.
“We can say with near certainty that these new cases are almost exclusively people who, for whatever reason, have not been vaccinated,” Murphy said. “The good news, obviously, is that we are now recording many fewer new cases in one week than we previously had been seeing in one day.”
Murphy said the state has topped 5 million people who are fully vaccinated.