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Another six Maine residents died while health officials reported on Thursday 735 new cases of coronavirus across the state.
Thursday’s report raises the total number of coronavirus cases in Maine to 21,226, according to the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention. That’s 20,491 on Wednesday.
Of these, 18,258 were confirmed positive, while 2,968 were classified as “probable cases”, reported the Maine CDC.
A resident of Aroostook County, three residents of Oxford County, a resident of Penobscot County and a resident of York County succumbed to the virus, bringing the death toll across the state to 317. Almost all deaths occurred in Mainers over 60 years old.
Thursday’s report marked the second time when new cases rose above 700 in Maine and the seventh time in the last 10 days when they rose above 400. Maine saw new cases rise above 700 for the first time on Wednesday.
The latest increase in new cases may be 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 “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 at least 25 percent of them are not linked to known cases or trips.
So far, 1,015 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, 39 more Mainers have recovered from the coronavirus, bringing the total reported recoveries to 11,078. This means that there are at least 9,831 confirmed and “probable” cases active in the state, down from 9,141 on Wednesday.
Maine CDC data is likely to underestimate the actual number of recoveries, as investigators have been struggling 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 – 12,456 – 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 Wednesday, there were 1,110,800 negative test results out of 1,137,245 in total. 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 6,313 cases were reported and where most virus deaths – 90 – were concentrated. Other cases have been reported in Androscoggin (2,391), Aroostook (477), Franklin (435), Hancock (497), Kennebec (1,586), Knox (325), Lincoln (272), Oxford (1,032), Penobscot (1,822), Piscataquis (103), Sagadahoc (340), Somerset (684), Waldo (362), Washington (331) and York (4,257) counties. Information on where two additional cases were reported was not immediately available.
As of Thursday morning, the coronavirus had infected 18,466,231 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 326,232 deaths from according to Johns Hopkins University of Medicine.