(Bloomberg) -- New Jersey will allow fishing charters and other watercraft rentals to resume on Sunday but require specific, strict social distances measures and maintenance of passenger logs for potential contact tracing, the state’s governor said.
The resumption of nautical ventures follows news on Thursday that New Jersey beaches will be open for the Memorial Day weekend. It’s part of Governor Phil Murphy’s “deliberate incremental steps” to bring the state’s economy back from a shelter-in-place order designed to slow the spread of coronavirus.
“The data says that it is possible” even as the blanket stay-at-home order imposed on March 21 mostly stays in place, Murphy said a press briefing on Saturday.
Murphy said he’d outline medical and other markers he’ll be assessing toward lifting the order on Monday or Tuesday. A patchwork of activities are now permitted in the Garden State: golf, for example, but not tennis.
Most medical indicator trends across the state’s northern, central and southern regions are “moving in the right directions,” he said.
“While we know we are not entirely out of the woods yet, New Jersey is beginning to fall a little bit more in line with some of the big states and neighbors we compare ourselves too.” New Jersey, New York, Connecticut and Pennsylvania have been coordinating their reopening approaches.
Fewer Admittances
Murphy outlined a continued decline in the number of patients on ventilators and in intensive care. And in the past day, the discharge of 380 Covid patients from hospitals was more than double the new admittances.
Still, another 115 state residents died from Covid-19 in the past day, bringing New Jersey’s total deaths to 10,249. Cases reached 145,089, up 1,239. More than half the state’s deaths have been in long-term care facilities like nursing homes.
Coronavirus deaths in the U.S. exceed 88,000 and cases are over 1.4 million. New Jersey’s level of cases and fatalities is second only to New York.
Murphy also disclosed that the state’s public transit agency as received $1.4 billion in CARES Act funding, and that he spoke Friday with President Donald Trump.
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