Maine’s COVID Death Count Includes Natural Cause Deaths up to 30 days after Positive Test.
Posted by Edmund R. Folsom, February 26, 2022
Maine’s COVID-19 death count includes natural cause deaths that occur within 30 days of a positive test. The February 25, 2022, Portland Press Herald reports that, until January 2, 2022, natural cause deaths were counted as deaths with COVID-19 if they occurred within 14 days of a positive test. That was expanded to 30 days on January 2, just as Maine’s Omicron variant surge was reaching its peak.
As of 2/26/2022, Maine’s breakdown of COVID-19 cases and deaths by age throughout the pandemic is as follows:
Age Cases Deaths %Cases %Deaths DPC*
<20 58,113 3 25.7% 0.14% 0.000051
20s 36,070 10 16.0% 0.48% 0.00027
30s 34,960 23 15.5% 1.11% 0.00065
40s 29,061 60 12.9% 2.90% 0.002
50s 28,816 180 12.7% 8.72% 0.0062
60s 20,701 341 9.2% 16.52% 0.016
70s 10,892 537 4.8% 26.01% 0.049
80+ 7,505 910 3.3% 44.08% 0.12
*DPC = deaths per (recorded) case
From this, we see that 86.62% of all recorded deaths with COVID-19 (1,788 of 2,064) have involved people ages 60 and over. On the other hand, this age group represents only 39,098 of all recorded COVID-19 cases, or 17.29%.
People ages 50 and older make up 95.34% of Maine’s deaths with COVID-19 (1,968 of 2,064) while comprising only 30% of Maine’s recorded COVID-19 cases (67,914 of 226,118).
While COVID-19 cases among people under age 50 comprise 69.96% of all Maine’s recorded cases, only 4.65% of Maine’s recorded deaths with COVID-19 have occurred in this age group (96 of 2,064).
The most recent numbers from Maine’s CDC on “COVID-19 and Youth in Maine” tell us that only 113 people under the age of 25 have been hospitalized with COVID-19 throughout the entire pandemic. That accounts for 2.61% of Maine’s overall 4,313 hospitalizations with COVID-19. Maine has explicitly chosen not to distinguish between people who happen to test positive for COVID-19 while hospitalized and people who are hospitalized by or because of COVID-19.
Update 2/28/2022: So-called breakthrough COVID-19 infections in people at least 14 days post final vaccine dose now comprise 35.3% of all Maine COVID-19 cases since the date in January of 2021 when the first Maine person was fully vaccinated (67,402 of 190,831). As Maine continues to clear its once huge backlog of uncategorized tests results, breakthrough cases over the past 5 (near-weekly) reporting periods since January 14, 2022, have comprised 55.9% of all recorded cases (37,241 of 66,614). Maine’s COVID-19 dashboard shows that 73.49% of the overall population have received a final vaccine dose.