Maine’s COVID-19 hospitalizations have risen to their highest point since early March.
It comes as an even more transmissible version of the highly contagious omicron subvariant is gaining a foothold in Maine, accounting for more than 1 in 10 cases in April, up from 1 percent in March.
There are now 143 Mainers infected with COVID-19 in hospitals across the state as of Friday morning, according to the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention. That’s up from 132 the day before and 99 on April 19, about a 44 percent increase over the past 10 days.
It’s also the highest point hospitalizations have reached since March 8.
Of those, 34 Mainers are in critical care and five are on ventilators. The number of Mainers in critical care is the highest since March 4, while those on ventilators have fallen from 11 since Wednesday and is in line with the numbers reported in recent weeks, state data show.
Still, hospitalizations remain down across the board from the heights they reached a little more than three months ago, when more than 430 Mainers required stays in the hospital for treatment.
Even as the so-called stealth omicron variant — BA.2 — has driven up case counts in recent weeks, the subvariant has proved so far elsewhere to result in less severe infections, and there are signs in places such as Boston that a surge in cases may be set to recede.