The Maine Disease Control and Prevention Center on Saturday reported 164 cases of the new coronavirus and four additional deaths, as the trend in lower-case counts continued a day after state officials released all counties in the state for school instruction in people.
Maine officials on Friday mentioned comparatively low case counts and the expected arrival of more doses of vaccine to move all 16 counties to the “greenest” category at least risk. Androscoggin, Franklin, Oxford and York counties were previously designated as “yellow”, meaning that a combination of face-to-face and virtual instruction is recommended.
Cumulative coronavirus cases in the state increased to 42,419 on Saturday. Of these, 33,823 were confirmed by tests and 8,596 are considered probable cases of COVID-19. The seven-day average of new daily cases was 195 on Saturday, compared with 625.3 at its peak on January 14.
Six hundred and forty-seven people have died of COVID-19 since the pandemic began in Maine. The Maine CDC released generalized information about the deceased, with no correlation per person: three were women and one was a man; two were residents of Penobscot County, a resident of Franklin County and a resident of Kennebec County; and one was in his 70s, while the rest were 80 or older.
Governor Janet Mills has also eased restrictions on meetings in places of worship, which can now accommodate five people per square meter of indoor space, or 50 people, whichever is greater.
The optimistic outlook last week was tempered, however, by the news that a variant of COVID-19 first identified in the UK had arrived in Maine. The coronavirus strain known as B.1.1.7 is significantly more transmissible than the version Mainers came to know about, but apparently is no longer resistant to vaccines now in distribution.
On Saturday, 169,429 Mainers received the first dose of a vaccine against COVID-19 and 68,018 received a second, according to Maine CDC statistics. Of Maine’s total population of 1.34 million, 12.6% have already received their first dose.
On Saturday morning, Mills and Dr. Nirav Shah, director of Maine’s CDC, visited the Northern Light Health community’s vaccination site at the Cross Insurance Center in Bangor. It was created to vaccinate at least 1,000 Maine people a day, Northern Light Health said.
Maine officials announced last week that they had purchased more than 2 million N95 respirators that were revealed to be potentially counterfeit. Federal authorities are investigating a huge foreign-made counterfeiting operation that has sold fake masks to several states, including Minnesota, New Jersey, Ohio and Washington.
Maine officials did not disclose how much they paid for these masks, but said they had referred the case to federal authorities. Approximately 161,000 of the masks have been distributed to health centers, civil servants and school nurses in Maine since November.
Governor Janet Mills and Dr. Nirav Shah, director of the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention, visited the Northern Light Health community’s vaccination site at the Cross Insurance Center in Bangor on Saturday morning. Benjamin Speed / Northern Light Health
County by county in Maine since the pandemic began, there were 4,593 cases of coronavirus in Androscoggin, 1,221 in Aroostook, 11,934 in Cumberland, 866 in Franklin, 847 in Hancock, 3,453 in Kennebec, 603 in Knox, 539 in Lincoln, 2,111 in Oxford , 3,674 in Penobscot, 241 in Piscataquis, 847 in Sagadahoc, 1,205 in Somerset, 562 in Waldo, 691 in Washington and 9,032 in York.
By age, 15.1 percent of patients were under 20, while 18 percent were in their 20s, 14.4 percent were in their 30s, 13.1 percent in their 40s, 15.3 percent in their 50s, 11.7 percent in their 60s, 6.7 percent were in their 70s and 5.7 percent were 80 or older.
Of the 100 patients with COVID-19 in Maine hospitals on Saturday, 27 were in intensive care and nine were on ventilators. The state had 113 beds of intensive care units available out of a total of 393, and 244 ventilators available from 319. There were also 446 alternative ventilators.
Across the world by late Saturday afternoon, there were more than 108.4 million known cases of COVID-19 and about 2.4 million deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University. The United States had 27.5 million cases and 483,544 deaths.
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