Woodbridge's COVID Case Numbers Back To January Levels

WOODBRIDGE, NJ — The number of coronavirus cases in Woodbridge have returned to January levels, Mayor John McCormac announced Friday.

In the last seven days, April 30 to May 6, Woodbridge had 288 new cases of coronavirus from the general public, which is the town's worst week since the very high surge in January.

The BA.2 strain of COVID has been spreading in New Jersey for several weeks, though it is milder than delta or omicron, said McCormac.

There is a COVID surge currently happening in New Jersey: New Jersey's seven-day average is up 20 percent from a week ago, and up 133 percent from early April, according to NJ.com. Meanwhile, the FDA has severely limited the use of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine due to potential blood clots it can cause.

Also, Rutgers announced this week that Rutgers scientists have developed a lab test that can quickly and easily identify which variant of the virus causing COVID-19 has infected a person. This is significant because most PCR COVID-19 tests taken by patients – often offered via drive-through pharmacy windows or mail-in packets – only detect the presence of the virus and don’t identify any particular strain.

Details of the PCR (polymerase chain reaction) test have been published in The Journal of Molecular Diagnostics. The paper includes directions for how to employ so-called “molecular beacons,” a powerful technique that seeks out molecules that carry genetic information to make proteins, co-invented by one of the paper’s authors, Sanjay Tyagi, a professor of medicine at the Public Health Research Institute at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School.

“We were able to make a PCR test, just like the ones involved in a normal COVID-19 diagnosis, that detects not only the SARS-CoV-2 virus, but also identifies which variant is present,” said Ryan Dikdan, a doctoral student in Tyagi’s lab who is first author on the paper. “This is significant because we can now identify the variants as they emerge in every sample, very rapidly.”

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