The Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention on Saturday reported 53 new cases of the novel coronavirus and no new deaths, a large daily increase boosted by the detection of 36 new cases at the York County Jail.
Maine’s cumulative cases rose to 4,489 on Saturday, according to the Maine CDC. Of those, 4,032 have been confirmed by testing and 457 are considered probable cases of COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus.
One hundred thirty-two people have died with COVID-19 in Maine.
Subtracting the number of people who have recovered – 3,899 – and died, there were 458 active cases on Saturday.
An outbreak at the York County Jail spread dramatically over the past week, growing from an apparent 18 cases to 54 cases on Friday, with 80 tests still left to analyze. Thirty-five inmates are infected.
The outbreak stems from a wedding reception in Millinocket that directly or indirectly infected over 120 people, according to the Maine CDC. A jail employee attended the wedding reception, state health officials said.
Nine cases at Maple Crest Rehabilitation Center in Madison also have been connected to the wedding reception.
State officials on Friday reinstated the license of Big Moose Inn, the venue that hosted the reception, after the business made changes to comply with state pandemic regulations. The inn was found in violation after it hosted an indoor reception with more than 50 people, the limit in Maine.
A spokesman for the inn said Friday that its leadership had divided the reception into two parties in order to stay under the limit, but had failed to anticipate that they would commingle.
“Our hearts go out to the family, those affected by the virus who were at the wedding, and those who have been impacted since then,” the spokesman, Dan Cashman, said. “There is no doubt that this virus is dangerous with wide-ranging impacts.”
One person has died in the outbreak that resulted from the reception, according to the Maine CDC.
Meanwhile, the University of Maine in Orono continues to track an outbreak as it welcomes students back to campus. University officials on Saturday said there had been no changes in case numbers since Friday, when there were six known cases in Orono.
UMaine officials said they planned to update their online testing results portal on Saturday night to give students easier access to results. Students with active accounts will have to reset their passwords, officials said in a news release.
In the wider University of Maine System, there are three more cases: one at the University of Maine School of Law, one at the University of Southern Maine, and another at the University of Maine at Farmington.
County by county in Maine since the beginning of the pandemic, there have been 610 COVID-19 cases in Androscoggin, 38 in Aroostook, 2,183 in Cumberland, 50 in Franklin, 45 in Hancock, 187 in Kennebec, 29 in Knox, 35 in Lincoln, 60 in Oxford, 228 in Penobscot, eight in Piscataquis, 60 in Sagadahoc, 50 in Somerset, 69 in Waldo, 15 in Washington, and 822 in York.
By age, 10.1 percent of patients were under 20, while 16.6 percent were in their 20s, 15.4 percent were in their 30s, 14.7 percent were in their 40s, 16.2 percent were in their 50s, 11.5 percent were in their 60s, 7.9 percent were in their 70s, and 7.6 percent were 80 or over.
Women still make up a slight majority of cases, at just over 51 percent.
Maine’s hospitals had eight patients with COVID-19 on Saturday, of whom two were in intensive care and one was on a ventilator. There were 122 intensive care unit beds available of a statewide 392, and 268 ventilators available of 319. Maine also had 442 alternative ventilators.
Around the world late Saturday afternoon, there were 24.8 million known cases of COVID-19 and more than 839,000 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University. The United States had more than 5.9 million cases and 182,653 deaths.
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