Another 16 Maine residents died while health officials reported on Friday another 823 cases of coronavirus across the state.
Friday’s report raises the total number of coronavirus cases in Maine to 32,781, according to the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention. That is 31,958 on Thursday.
Of these, 26,923 were confirmed positive, while 5,858 were classified as “probable cases”, reported the Maine CDC.
The 16 deaths reported on Friday bring the death toll across the state to 477. The deaths reported today include two Androscoggin County residents, five Aroostook County residents, two Cumberland County residents, two County residents of Hancock, a resident of Oxford County, two residents of Penobscot County and two residents of Washington County. Thirteen of the people who died were women, while three were men. One was 40, one was 50, two were 60, two were 70 and 10 were 80 or older.
Maine’s seven-day average for new coronavirus cases is 627.1, up from 622.4 the previous day, up from 539.9 the previous week and up from 403.7 the previous month. Before that increase began in late October, Maine’s seven-day average was in its mid-30s.
The Maine CDC continues to report widespread high levels of transmission in the community, defined as a case rate of 16 or more per 10,000 people, even in counties once largely spared the worst of the pandemic.
There are two criteria for establishing transmission in the community: at least 10 confirmed cases and that at least 25 percent of them are not linked to known cases or trips.
So far, 1,228 Maine residents have been hospitalized at some point with COVID-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus. As of Friday, 193 patients are hospitalized with 61 in intensive care and 24 on a ventilator.
Vaccination has been administered to 70,228 Mainers so far, with 10,617 having received two doses.
There were 1,328,905 negative test results out of 1,368,816 overall. About 2.85 percent of all tests were positive, show the most recent data available from the Maine CDC.
Coronavirus hit most heavily in Cumberland County, where 9,650 cases were reported and where most virus deaths – 119 – were concentrated. Other cases have been reported in Androscoggin (3,553), Aroostook (996), Franklin (552), Hancock (671), Kennebec (2,472), Knox (466), Lincoln (385), Oxford (1,523), Penobscot (2,787), Piscataquis (155), Sagadahoc (589), Somerset (930), Waldo (423), Washington (484) and York counties (7,125). Information on where 20 additional cases were reported was not immediately available.
On Friday night, the coronavirus sickened 23,520,561 people 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 391,922 deaths, according to with Johns Hopkins University of Medicine.