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September 20 – Maine sticks to its COVID-19 strategy as the virus rages through Maine’s unvaccinated population in a first major spike in cases since the shooting began and the restrictions disappeared.
As Maine maintained the third-lowest case rate among states during the pandemic, it is hammered on what looks like the background of a summer wave of cases in the United States driven by the delta variant contagious, with the fastest growing two-week transmission rate of any state starting Thursday and setting a new record for critical COVID-19 patients on Friday.
Much of it falls under the same relaxed public health policies that date back to the spring and early summer, when politically sensitive economic restrictions were gradually removed. Masks are simply recommended in crowded indoor environments under federal recommendations that Maine reflects. State and federal vaccine mandates covering at least two-fifths of the workforce here are expected to take effect this fall, but the effect could be slow.
The director of the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Nirav Shah, on Wednesday defended the state’s strategy under the leadership of Governor Janet Mills, saying the outbreak was not due to state policies, saying that “there isn’t a place in the world” where cases don’t spread quickly.
“It depends as much on how the patterns of transmission change as a variant moves in a population,” he said. “As they do, the patterns will modulate. There will be peaks and valleys.”
The viruses spread in spurts, said Robert Horsburgh, professor of epidemiology at Boston University, but the combination of increased tourism with distance and relaxed masking allowed the virus to spread widely despite nearly 74% of Mainers fully vaccinated.
In the absence of stricter policies and as vaccination remains slow, Horsburgh said people should consider masking more and avoiding indoor meals. He also said officials should continue to insist on initial injections rather than recalls, which could be accelerated by Maine’s alignment with federal workplace safety requirements for employers.
“The virus cannot spread if there are not enough unvaccinated people to maintain transmission,” he said.
For now, there is: Maine had a reproduction number – or the number of people that a person positive for COVID-19, on average, spreads the virus – greater than a Thursday, even though 35 states had gone into below one at that time. This means that the cases are expected to continue to increase here.
Part of the challenge is giving people enough time to get vaccinated. Pfizer and Moderna vaccines require two injections three weeks apart and two weeks thereafter for a person to be considered fully vaccinated. The Johnson & Johnson single injection vaccine takes two weeks.
All of them have been shown to be very effective in protecting against severe cases of the virus. So-called breakthrough cases among vaccinated people have risen sharply in recent weeks, accounting for 16% of cases between August 6 and September 10, but unvaccinated people were still more than eight times more likely to be infected and almost all these cases were mild.
The timing issue is part of the reason the Mills administration has given healthcare workers an extra month to get vaccinated as part of its controversial tenure, although the state has said that deadline does not apply. applies only at application and not when employees need to be vaccinated.
Jeffrey Austin, a lobbyist for the Maine Hospital Association, said some staff may get vaccinated between October 1 and the October 29 application deadline. Spokesmen for MaineHealth, Northern Light Health and MaineGeneral all said they were considering the deadline for employees to show proof of vaccination or be taken off the schedule as October 29.
It is unclear how quickly large private and public sector employers will have to follow suit. The state must confirm within 30 days of the adoption of its final rules by the Federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration. But this timeline is not clear. Lindsay Crete, a spokesperson for Mills, said the administration would wait for this to happen before intervening.
“We recognize that there will be many questions,” she said.
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