News 12 New Jersey has learned that nearby emergency rooms are not busier than they were before a ransomware attack that impacted two New Jersey hospitals.

Hackensack Meridian Mountainside Medical Center and Hackensack Meridian Pascack Valley have stopped diverting patients.

A spokesperson for Hackensack Meridian Health System told News 12 that Mountainside will be on stroke divert in the evenings between 7 p.m. and 7 a.m. for the time being, asking local ambulance services to transport stroke patients to other emergency rooms in the area. Pascack Valley is fully on stroke divert.

Officials also said that as they work to bring their systems back online, hospitals will continue to evaluate their ability to safely care for critically ill patients in their emergency rooms. 

"Our health care administration has been highly targeted over the last couple of years and it has only increased with COVID and beyond," said Greg Pepper, security architect at Check Point.

According to Hackensack Meridian, the status of the hospitals may continue to change as the situation changes.

"When these computer systems are targeted and impacted, they often have to take it offline to remediate and restore services and capability,” Pepper said.

On Tuesday, Capital Health, with three hospitals in Hopewell and Trenton, recognized a network outage believed to be a cybersecurity attack.  They have not stopped taking care of patients in their hospitals, including emergency rooms.