Maine CDC reports 402 coronavirus cases, 11 deaths

The Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention reported 402 cases of the new coronavirus and 11 deaths on Saturday, bringing the toll of Maine’s continuing outbreak even higher as a second vaccine was cleared.

The US Food and Drug Administration approved a Moderna vaccine on Friday, paving the way for millions of additional doses. But officials in Maine say their federal counterparts have confused the rollout of the earlier Pfizer vaccine, which arrived in smaller numbers of doses than expected.

Maine is still breaking unwanted records in terms of the number of cases, hospitalizations and deaths. The seven-day average for the status of daily new cases was 449 on Saturday, down slightly from Friday’s record after daily new cases hit 616 on Wednesday. Maine added more than 3,100 cases and recorded 35 deaths of people with COVID-19 in the past week. The boom seems to be accelerating; the previous week, Maine had recorded 2,000 new cases and 23 deaths.

The cumulative cases in Maine rose to 18,739 on Saturday, of which 16,266 were confirmed by testing and 2,473 are considered probable cases of COVID-19.

Two hundred and ninety-two people have died from COVID-19 since the start of the pandemic in Maine and 10,766 have recovered from the disease. Maine had 7,681 active cases on Saturday, up from 4,886 a week ago and 2,907 a week earlier.

Information on those believed to have died on Saturday was not immediately available from the CDC.

A week after the approval of Pfizer’s first vaccine, Maine is still struggling to vaccinate all of its frontline healthcare workers and long-term care residents. The state had drawn up an ambitious plan to vaccinate the vast majority of the population in a matter of weeks, but the doses were slow in coming.

Officials from Operation Warp Speed, the Trump administration’s vaccination program, said last week that Maine would receive about 8,700 doses of the Pfizer vaccine next week, a 40% reduction from expected numbers. Dr Nirav Shah, director of the Maine CDC, said the delay had forced officials to “choose not to activate another phase” of their immunization schedule for lack of doses.

Across the country, there likely won’t be enough doses for the general population before spring, NIH director Dr Francis Collins told The Associated Press this week.

Meanwhile, four hospitals in Maine have reached record levels of COVID-19 hospital patients. The Eastern Maine Medical Center in Bangor received an average of 26.6 inpatients for the week ending Thursday, joining the MaineGeneral in Augusta, Mid Coast in Brunswick and York Hospital, all of which set records for ‘hospitalization.

County by county in Maine since the start of the pandemic, there have been 2,131 cases of coronavirus in Androscoggin, 401 in Aroostook, 5690 in Cumberland, 384 in Franklin, 472 in Hancock, 1391 in Kennebec, 294 in Knox, 234 in Lincoln, 841 in Oxford, 1,520 in Penobscot, 89 in Piscataquis, 287 in Sagadahoc, 625 in Somerset, 334 in Waldo, 290 in Washington and 3,372 in York.

By age, 15.1% of patients were under 20, 17.4% in their twenties, 13.8% in their thirties, 12.7% in their forties, 14.9% in their fifties, 11.8 % in their 60s, 7.7% in their 70s, and 6.7% were 80 or older.

Women still make up a slight majority of cases, which rose to 52% this week after holding almost 51% during the summer and fall.

Updated data on hospital capacity was not yet available on Saturday morning. As of Friday, hospitals in Maine had 177 patients with COVID-19, including 46 in intensive care and 15 on ventilators. The state had 82 intensive care unit beds out of a total of 385 and 233 out of 315 ventilators. There were also 444 reciprocating ventilators.

Globally on Saturday morning, there were 75.7 million known cases of COVID-19 and nearly 1.7 million deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University. The United States had 17.4 million cases and more than 313,000 deaths.

This story will be updated.

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