Looking back on it now, the canary in the coal mine could most clearly be heard on Monday, March 9, when Princeton University announced it would shift to online classes following spring break. It was the first major New Jersey school or business to send virtually its entire population home in response to the looming coronavirus crisis.
The days that followed were unnerving, chaotic. Some school districts and colleges started closing; others stayed open. St. Patrick’s Day parades were canceled, but gyms, parks and bars didn’t miss a beat. As late as March 11, state officials still were touting the risk of the novel virus as low.
Meanwhile, Gov. Phil Murphy still had not even made a public appearance as he recovered from surgery to remove a cancerous tumor on his kidney.
And then, the dominoes began to fall, though even at that point incrementally. On Monday, March 16, Murphy — fully back in the saddle now and facing the defining event of his governorship — ordered bars, restaurants and cinemas to shut-down. A day later, shopping malls were shuttered and any schools still open were directed to close.
Yet it wasn’t until Saturday, March 21 — 17 days after the first positive coronavirus case in New Jersey — that Murphy closed all non-essential businesses and ordered residents to stay home. By comparison, New York, Nevada and Illinois’ governors issued similar orders the day before, and California’s governor the day before that. (New York’s order did not take effect until the day after New Jersey’s went into effect; Nevada closed non-essential business on March 20, but did not issue a stay-at-home order until March 31.)”
As of Tuesday, New Jersey had 113,856 cases and 6,442 deaths — by far the second-most of any state in the country. More New Jerseyans have died during the pandemic than 9/11, World War 1 or the Vietnam War. And though Murphy has received mostly praise for his handling of the unprecedented crisis — and his approval rating has soared to 71% — an unavoidable, possibly unanswerable question lingers: In a rapidly-evolving circumstance where every single minute counted, did the governor wait too long to shut down New Jersey?
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Some academics and public health experts say that even though Murphy has performed his job well generally, he still could have acted sooner in enacting widespread closures and distancing measures.
“Earlier intervention would surely have reduced the size of the affected population,” Princeton professor Samuel S. Wang said. “This particular pandemic has an early-stage doubling time of three days. Potentially, starting three days earlier might have cut the affected population in half. Six days earlier, it might have been cut by three-fourths.”
Murphy also faced criticism Monday after unveiling a six-point coronavirus recovery plan that called for widespread testing and contact tracing after at least two weeks of declines in infections and deaths, but failed to include any timetable for when restrictions may be eased.
Still, the governor defended the timeliness of his actions in an interview with NJ Advance Media last week, touting New Jersey as ranking fourth nationally “in earliest closures and testing.” But, he added, he was resigned to facing an eventual postmortem on how he and the state handled the crisis.
“If I knew two months ago what I know now, would we have tweaked what we had done?” Murphy said. “The answer has got to be yes.”
‘The numbers speak for themselves’
Making the call to shut-down an entire state or city, shutter businesses and schools and take away bedrock freedoms like access to public parks, is no easy decision. Then imagine the choice rests, ultimately, on the shoulders of just one person.
Still, states and cities that took quick, decisive action in the face of the coronavirus outbreak have generally fared better in keeping down infections and deaths, experts said. They pointed to places like California, Ohio and Washington state that swiftly enacted widespread closures and in turn kept their rates relatively low.
Locally, Hoboken Mayor Ravi Bhalla boasted how the more draconian efforts taken in the nation’s fourth-densest city led to significantly less cases than other Hudson County cities. Hoboken was the first municipality on the East Coast to recommend self-isolation, Bhalla said, and the city closed health clubs, movie theaters and restricted bars and restaurants to take out and delivery before Murphy imposed the same constraints on the entire state.
In turn, Hoboken has the fewest cases and deaths per 1,000 residents of any large city or town in Hudson County.
“The numbers speak for themselves,” Bhalla said. “The measures we took before anybody else in the country in some cases, or the region, the results are borne out in the rate of infection.”
Murphy learned of the state’s first coronavirus case after having surgery March 4, but by the time he shuttered the state and issued a stay-at-home order, New Jersey had 1,327 coronavirus cases and 16 deaths. Known infections would explode over the next five weeks by nearly 8,500%.
Some experts said the difficult decision took too long.
“In an ideal world, you want to put on the interventions before there’s any positive cases in your area,” said Stephanie Silvera, an epidemiologist and professor of public health at Montclair State. “Once it’s in the area, it’s much harder to contain it.”
“If we had just shifted everything up by a week or two, we might have had a lower curve in general,” she added.
In San Francisco, Mayor London Breed declared a state of emergency in late February before the city had a single confirmed case of the coronavirus. In Ohio, Gov. Mike DeWine made the decision to close schools March 16 when the state only had five cases.
“The reality is if you impose earlier on an exponential growth process, you will greatly reduce the burden that society ultimately feels from that growth,” said Jeffrey Shaman, a professor of environmental health sciences at Columbia University. “Earlier action is better.”
‘A universe we’ve never worked through’
As any football coach or Monday morning quarterback can tell you, of course, hindsight is always 20/20. The wishes for an earlier shutdown bump into a very hard reality: Murphy was facing a set of unprecedented decisions. And New Jersey is a particularly challenging state to shut down.
Once Murphy publicly returned to work March 13 — just nine days after surgery — he was forced to weigh closing schools, businesses, parks, places of worship and more, knowing each choice would result in unimaginable economic and social hardships, not to mention plenty of political pushback.
Plus, he had to make these seismic decisions in a matter of days — sometimes hours.
“I remember spending a lot of time with the team, trying to figure out, ‘Okay, what if we do this? What if we do that? Why are we doing it?’” Murphy said. “At every step of the way we've concluded the alternative was a lot worse than the path we’ve taken.”
By March 13, Washington state and California were being touted as the epicenters of the coronavirus outbreak in the U.S. Washington state had 568 cases and 37 deaths at the time, while California reported 247 cases and five deaths.
The same day, New Jersey had 50 positive cases and one death.
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Murphy and his staff were exploring different restrictions while jostling with the state’s unique, fractured makeup that includes 565 municipalities, many with their own school districts, police and fire departments and local elected officials. The composition of, say, Bergen County and Salem County could not be more stark, yet Murphy weighed decisions that would impact both equally.
Nonetheless, some experts say that leaders in New Jersey — and New York — should have been bracing for the virus to explode under their noses. It was a crucial time to be taking decisive action, they said, but Murphy stuck to a script of implementing restrictions by piecemeal, carefully weighing each decision.
On March 16, he closed bars, restaurants and cinemas and limited recreational and social gatherings to 50 people. Two days later, Murphy finally ordered schools closed on March 18, even though more than 500 of the state’s nearly 600 public school districts had already shuttered.
Only 14 states closed schools later than New Jersey, according to data collected by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington.
“Yes, New Jersey could have been earlier,” Shaman said. “But again: Hindsight is 20/20 on this. In some instances, you’re going to see steps that probably should have been done earlier or better.”
Pat Callahan, superintendent of the New Jersey State Police, said the decision to shutter schools was among the most difficult for Murphy. They had to consider whether remote learning would be successful for all of the roughly 1.4 million public school students, while also weighing if child abuse or domestic violence would spike with children being forced to stay home.
“You’re trying to define a universe that we’ve really never worked through before,” Callahan said.
“We waited,” Murphy said, “because we wanted to get it right.”
It took him three more days to issue the stay-at-home order and close non-essential businesses.
Murphy said the call came down to weighing two horrible options. If he kept the state open, business owners could pay their bills, but thousands more would die, and the healthcare system would be overrun. On the other side, if he ordered a shut-down, some businesses would never reopen, ruining countless lives and driving a stake through the state economy.
Callahan compared the decisions to “building the airplane mid-flight and the wings were on fire.”
‘A day can have a dramatic reduction’
By mid-April, Hoboken had about half the number of coronavirus cases compared to neighboring towns in Hudson County. In San Francisco, the city has just 1,468 cases and 23 deaths.
“Hoboken is literally sandwiched between all these jurisdictions where positive tests are through the roof,” said Bhalla, the city’s mayor. “Those numbers are evidence that early measures we took have had a meaningful impact in protecting public safety.”
There are no studies showing how New Jersey could have fared better if tough restrictions were put in place sooner. But experts nearly across the board said earlier action would have reduced infections and deaths.
“The modeling shows that even a day can have a dramatic reduction in the number of cases that occur,” said Andrew Goodman, a clinical professor at New York University.
Those closest to Murphy and many others praise his leadership, energy and decision-making throughout the pandemic. They say he’s performed his job as well as any leader in the country.
“The governor has been effective,” state Assemblyman John Burzichelli, D-Gloucester, said. “There’s never been a sense of panic.”
Callahan, the State Police superintendent, has worked closely with Murphy, watching him weigh choices from up close. The governor always makes decisions with one thing in mind above all else, Callahan said.
“His passion and desire to protect as many people, to save as many lives,” Callahan said. “Every decision is rooted in that. He never once wavered from that, and he never will.”
CLARIFICATION: This article has been updated to reflect the fact that New York’s stay-at-home order, announced before New Jersey’s, actually went into effect on March 22. The story was also revised to reflect that the Mayor of Hoboken only had the authority to recommend residents stay-at-home, not order them to do so.
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Matthew Stanmyre may be reached at mstanmyre@njadvancemedia.com.
Matt Arco may be reached at marco@njadvancemedia.com.