Another 13 Maine residents died while health officials reported on Thursday another 535 cases of coronavirus across the state.
Thursday’s report raises the total number of coronavirus cases in Maine to 27,625, according to the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention. That’s 27,090 on Wednesday.
Of these, 23,193 were confirmed as positive, while 4,432 were classified as “probable cases”, reported the Maine CDC.
A man in his 40s and a man in the 80s from Aroostook County; a woman in her 80s in Cumberland County; a man in his 60s and two women in his 90s in Hancock County; a 70-year-old woman from Kennebec County; a man in his 60s and a woman in his 80s in Oxford County; and a man in his 70s, two men in his 80s and a woman in his 90s in York County succumbed to the virus, bringing the death toll across the state to 385, according to a Maine spokesman. CDC, Robert Long. Almost all deaths occurred in Mainers over the age of 60.
Maine’s seven-day average for new coronavirus cases is 490.3, down from 513 the previous day, but above 426 the previous week and 289.9 the previous month.
Thursday’s report marked the seventh time in the past 10 days that new cases exceeded 400 and the third time this week when they reached 500. It comes as the high transmission of the virus continues its increase in months, bringing high levels of transmission of community, which Maine’s CDC defines as a case rate of 16 or more cases per 10,000 people, even in counties that have already been largely spared the worst of the pandemic.
There are two criteria for establishing transmission in the community: at least 10 confirmed cases and at least 25% of them are unrelated to known cases or trips.
So far, 1,135 Maine residents have been hospitalized at some point with COVID-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus. Of these, 202 people are currently hospitalized, with 55 in intensive care and 25 on ventilators.
Long said 42,317 Mainers had been vaccinated against the coronavirus.
Most cases – 16,472 – occurred in Mainers under the age of 50, while more cases were reported in women than in men, according to the Maine CDC.
As of Thursday, there were 1,237,205 negative test results out of a total of 1,271,403. More than 2.6 percent of all tests were positive, data from the Maine CDC show.
Coronavirus hit most heavily in Cumberland County, where 8,140 cases were reported and where most virus deaths – 108 – were concentrated. Other cases have been reported in Androscoggin (3,011), Aroostook (804), Franklin (503), Hancock (608), Kennebec (2,036), Knox (399), Lincoln (334), Oxford (1,257), Penobscot (2,423), Piscataquis (136), Sagadahoc (461), Somerset (815), Waldo (392), Washington (416) and York (5,888) counties. Information on where two additional cases were reported was not immediately available.
As of Thursday morning, the coronavirus had made 21,354,027 people ill in all 50 states, in the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands and the US Virgin Islands, in addition to causing 362,037 deaths, from according to Johns Hopkins University of Medicine.