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Four more Mainers died while health officials reported on Friday 700 new cases of coronavirus across the state.
Friday’s report raises the total number of coronavirus cases in Maine to 24,901, according to the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention. That’s more than 24,201 on Thursday.
Of these, 21,144 were confirmed as positive, while 3,757 were classified as “probable cases”, reported the Maine CDC.
The latest deaths include a woman in her 90s in Cumberland County; a woman in her 80s in Penobscot County; a man in his 90s in Washington County; and a woman in her 80s from Washington County. The death toll across the state is now 351.
As of Friday, 30,877 Maine residents have been vaccinated against COVID-19, or 2.02 percent of the population. Maine ranks third in the country for the vaccination rate according to Bloomberg’s vaccine tracker, second only to West Virginia with 2.50 percent and South Dakota with 2.14 percent. The fast pace occurs despite the state receiving thousands of doses less than expected.
Information on where new cases were detected was not available on Friday morning due to technical problems, said the Maine CDC. The current number of active cases was also unavailable.
Maine’s seven-day average for new coronavirus cases was 426.9 on Thursday, down from 431.6 the previous day and 460.6 the previous week, but above 172 the previous month.
So far, 1,080 Maine residents have been hospitalized at some point with COVID-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus. As of Friday, 188 people are hospitalized, 48 in critical care and 19 in ventilators.
There were 1,177,522 negative test results out of 1,207,730 in total. About 2.4 percent of all tests were positive, data from the Maine CDC show.
Coronavirus hit most heavily in Cumberland County, where as of Thursday 7,233 cases have been reported and where most virus deaths – 97 – have been concentrated. Other cases have been reported in Androscoggin (2,667), Aroostook (617), Franklin (451), Hancock (550), Kennebec (1,812), Knox (370), Lincoln (301), Oxford (1,115), Penobscot (2,050), Piscataquis (117), Sagadahoc (387), Somerset (743), Waldo (380), Washington (377) and York (5,030) counties.
As of Friday morning, the coronavirus had made 19,990,390 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 346,013 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University of Medicine.