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Another three Maine residents died while health officials on Monday reported 439 new cases of coronavirus across the state.
Monday’s report raises the total number of coronavirus cases in Maine to 22,319, according to the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention. That’s 21,880 on Sunday.
Of these, 19,128 were confirmed as positive, while 3,191 were classified as “probable cases”, reported the Maine CDC.
Three York County residents succumbed to the virus, bringing the death toll across the state to 326. Almost all deaths occurred in Maine over the age of 60.
Maine’s seven-day average for new coronavirus cases is 434.7, up from 419.7 the previous day, up from 424.1 days a week and 246 a month earlier.
Health officials have warned Mainers that “strong 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 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, 1,032 Maine residents have been hospitalized at some point with COVID-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus. Information on people currently hospitalized was not immediately available.
Meanwhile, 34 more Maine residents have recovered from the coronavirus, bringing the total reported recoveries to 11,184. This means that there are at least 10,809 confirmed and “probable” cases active in the state, up from 10,406 on Sunday.
Maine CDC data is likely to underestimate the actual number of recoveries, as researchers have struggled to keep up with the increase in virus transmission, making it difficult 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 – 12,959 – 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 in total. Almost 2.3 percent of all tests were positive, showing the most recent Maine CDC data available.
Coronavirus hit most heavily in Cumberland County, where 6,744 cases were reported and where most virus deaths – 92 – were concentrated. Other cases have been reported in Androscoggin (2,456), Aroostook (505), Franklin (439), Hancock (511), Kennebec (1,672), Knox (340), Lincoln (283), Oxford (1,043), Penobscot (1,871), Piscataquis (108), Sagadahoc (354), Somerset (704), Waldo (367), Washington (339) and York (4,574) counties. Information on where nine additional cases were reported was not immediately available.
As of Monday morning, the coronavirus had made 19,136,758 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 333,140 deaths from according to Johns Hopkins University of Medicine.