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Another five Mainers have died as health officials reported Tuesday that 28 more cases of the new coronavirus were detected.
There have now been 2,377 cases across all of Maine’s counties since the outbreak began here in March, according to the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention. That’s up from 2,349 on Monday.
Of those, 2,118 have been confirmed positive, while 259 are likely positive, according to the Maine CDC.
[Our COVID-19 tracker contains the most recent information on Maine cases by county]
Tuesday’s report marks the largest spike in deaths related to the coronavirus since April 23, when five people also died. The latest deaths involved four Cumberland County residents and one Penobscot County resident, bringing the statewide death toll to 94.
One of the Cumberland County residents was a woman over the age of 100.
“It’s conceivable that this is an individual who began her journey on this earth during the 1920 [flu] pandemic and left us during the 2020 pandemic,” Maine CDC Director Nirav Shah said Tuesday afternoon.
So far, 287 Mainers have been hospitalized at some point with COVID-19, the illness caused by the coronavirus. Of those, 48 people are currently hospitalized, with 16 in critical care and 10 on ventilators, according to the Maine CDC.
Meanwhile, 1,646 people have fully recovered from the virus, meaning there are 637 active and likely cases in the state, according to the Maine CDC. That’s down from 674 on Monday.
A majority of the cases have been in Mainers over age 50, while more cases have been reported in women than men, according to the Maine CDC.
As of Tuesday, there have been 54,692 negative test results out of 57,864 overall. About 5 percent of all tests have come back positive, Maine CDC data show.
The coronavirus has hit hardest in Cumberland County, where 1,203 cases have been confirmed and where the bulk of virus deaths — 54 — have been concentrated. It is one of four counties — the others are Androscoggin, Penobscot and York, with 314, 100 and 396 cases, respectively — where “community transmission” has been confirmed, according to the Maine CDC.
There are two criteria for establishing community transmission: at least 10 confirmed cases and that at least 25 percent of those are not connected to either known cases or travel. That second condition has not yet been “satisfied” in other counties.
Other cases have been detected in Aroostook (10), Franklin (36), Hancock (11), Kennebec (127), Knox (20), Lincoln (20), Oxford (33), Piscataquis (1), Sagadahoc (31), Somerset (22) Waldo (51) and Washington (1) counties. Information about where another case was detected wasn’t immediately available Tuesday.
As of Tuesday morning, the coronavirus has sickened 1,820,523 people in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands and the U.S. Virgin Islands, as well as caused 105,644 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University of Medicine.
Watch: What Maine is doing to expand contact tracing
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