New Jersey's Murphy says state won't soon be 'dialing back' social distancing guidelines

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New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy says aggressive stay-at-home policies are beginning to flatten coronavirus curve

Gov. Murphy tells Martha MacCallum that he expects the COVID-19 pandemic to hit its peak in New Jersey within the next two to three weeks.

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New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy said Sunday that he wouldn’t be reopening the Garden State’s economy or dialing back on social distancing guidelines anytime soon as New Jersey continues to be one of the states hardest hit by the coronavirus pandemic.

Murphy, a Democrat, said he understands the economic difficulties that his residents are living through, but said that “dialing back” the measures on social distancing would only exacerbate the problem

“Any sort of an economic reopening or recovery depends first and foremost on a complete health care recovery,” Murphy said on CBS’ “Face the Nation” Sunday.  “If we either transpose those steps or we start to get back on our feet too soon, I fear based on the data we’re looking at we could be throwing gasoline on a fire.”

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“The pain is awful, we get that in terms of unemployment. But based on how we see this evolving, I’m all for economic recovery, but it needs to be on the back of a full health care recovery,” he added.

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New Jersey sits only behind New York in the number of confirmed cases of COVID-19 with more than 58,000 people sick as of Sunday morning. The state’s Bergen and Essex counties, which sit across the Hudson River from New York, have recorded more than 800 deaths from the virus, according to the Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins University.

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Murphy also thanked President Trump for the supplies the federal government has provided to the state amid the crisis, but added that New Jersey continues to “be shy on all fronts and we are consistently not just asking the White House, but also turning over every stone in New Jersey and frankly around the world.”

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He added that ventilators and personal protective gear were at the top of the list of items the state was in need of.

“We need to have a regional approach, we can’t do this alone,” he said.