Two other Mainers died while health officials on Friday reported 321 new cases of coronavirus across the state.
Friday’s report brings the total number of coronavirus cases in Maine to 21,547, according to the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention. That’s 21,226 on Thursday.
Of these, 18,517 were confirmed as positive, while 3,030 were classified as “probable cases”, reported the Maine CDC.
A resident of Kennebec County and a resident of York County succumbed to the virus, bringing the death toll across the state to 319. Additional demographic details about these cases were not immediately available at Christmas. Almost all deaths occurred in Mainers over the age of 60.
Maine’s seven-day average for new coronavirus cases is 461.6, down from 477.4 the previous day, but above 437 the previous week and above 230 the previous month.
Friday’s report marked a sharp decline in new cases after consecutive days when it rose to more than 700 and, for the first time, has fallen to less than 400 since the weekend.
But that increase in new cases may have been partly due to Maine CDC investigators cleaning up a backlog of cases, the agency’s director, Nirav Shah, said on Wednesday. Despite record numbers recorded by Maine in the past few days, Shah noted that the transmission of the virus may be stabilizing.
Health officials have warned Mainers that “vigorous and widespread” community transmission is being observed across the state. Each county is seeing high transmission in the community, which Maine’s CDC defines as a case rate of 16 or more cases per 10,000 people.
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, 1,020 Maine residents have been hospitalized at some point with COVID-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus. Information on those who are hospitalized was not immediately available.
Meanwhile, 29 more Maine residents have recovered from the coronavirus, bringing the total reported recoveries to 11,107. This means that there are at least 10,121 confirmed and “probable” cases active in the state, down from 9,831 on Thursday.
Maine CDC data is likely to underestimate the actual number of recoveries, as investigators have struggled to keep up with the increase in virus transmission, making it difficult for them to track previous cases to confirm recoveries. Instead, the Maine CDC is only releasing data on recoveries directly reported to it. Underreported recoveries also affect the estimated number of probable active cases across the state.
Most cases – 12,610 – 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 1,122,739 negative test results out of 1,149,642 overall. Almost 2.3 percent of all tests were positive, showing the most recent data available from the Maine CDC.
Coronavirus hit most heavily in Cumberland County, where 6,472 cases were reported and where most virus deaths – 90 – were concentrated. Other cases have been reported in Androscoggin (2,438), Aroostook (482), Franklin (436), Hancock (502), Kennebec (1,590), Knox (326), Lincoln (275), Oxford (1,037), Penobscot (1,844), Piscataquis (105), Sagadahoc (347), Somerset (685), Waldo (365), Washington (335) and York (4,300) counties. Information on where eight more cases were reported was not immediately available.
As of Friday morning, the coronavirus had sick 18,696,477 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 329,662 deaths, from according to Johns Hopkins University of Medicine.