Maine hospitals report spike in patients with COVID-19 – Press Herald
The number of patients hospitalized in Maine with COVID-19 spiked Thursday to 193, the highest level since late February.
Maine’s patient count rose by 24 individuals, or 14 percent, in the past 24 hours after gradually rising over the past few weeks from about 100 to 169. Of the patients hospitalized Thursday morning, 33 were in critical care and three were on ventilators.
The Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention also reported 699 new cases Thursday and eight additional deaths.
A sharp increase in new cases over the past three weeks – including more than 1,000 on Tuesday and Wednesday – resulted in Maine having the highest infection rate among all states, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control.
As of Wednesday, Maine had reported 372 new cases per 100,000 residents over the previous seven days, nearly three times higher than the national average of 130 cases, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Maine is followed closely by Rhode Island, Vermont and New York.
Infections have spiked over the past few weeks in Maine and other Northeast states as new and more contagious versions of the virus spread across the region. The omicron BA.2 subvariant and two closely related subvariants – BA.2.12 and BA.2.12.1 – now account for 80 percent of the new infections in Maine, according to data released by the state.
The spike in Maine’s COVID cases is consistent around the state, said Dr. Dora Anne Mills, chief health improvement officer for the MaineHealth and former state CDC director. There is no specific region showing a significantly higher rate of COVID than any other.
With exceptions, there are two major groups of people admitted to hospitals specifically because of COVID, said Mills. Those are older, vaccinated people and younger, unvaccinated people.
Although the number of patients hospitalized in the MaineHealth network with COVID has rapidly increased, about two-thirds of those people are hospitalized because of the virus and the other one-third are in the hospital for other reasons but tested positive. Maine’s CDC reports only the number of patients with COVID and does not separate out those who are hospitalized for other reasons.
MaineHealth has found 1 in every 25, or 4 percent, of people admitted to the hospital for non-COVID conditions happen to have the virus, according Mills. That is significantly lower than the percent of people admitted to the hospital who coincidentally had COVID during the Jan. Omicron wave, when around 1 in 10, or 10 percent, of hospital patients were coincidentally positive.
The percentage of COVID patients in critical care was also higher in Jan., said Mills. Out of all of the state’s patients currently hospitalized with COVID, around 17 percent are in critical care. In January, about 25 percent of all patients statewide were in intensive care.
However Mills noted that just because people are not in critical care that doesn’t mean they aren’t very sick. “People can be quite sick before moving into critical care,” she said. People are generally moved to critical care when they are experiencing a life-threatening condition.
MaineHealth is also seeing patients who have had COVID multiple times, including some who were sick with omicron in January and then caught a new subvariant of the virus. One study that has not yet been peer-reviewed said some people have gotten BA.2 shortly after getting BA.1 but that those occurrences are rare.
Although the amount of COVID patients in critical care remains low, hospitals are still strained, just for other reasons, said Mills.
Strokes, mental health conditions, addiction and diabetes were just some of the conditions patients are coming to the hospital with in higher than pre-pandemic numbers, said Mills. She pointed to a few reasons for this, including stressors from the last few years, a bottleneck caused by people who delayed care during the pandemic and the COVID infection itself, which has been showed to increased risk of certain health conditions.
Since the pandemic began, Maine has recorded 248,798 cases and 2,304 deaths.
This story will be updated.
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