HOULTON, Maine — After enjoying a relatively safe period of low positive case counts during the COVID-19 pandemic that has gripped the nation over the past 10 months, it appears that spread of the virus has finally arrived in southern Aroostook County.
It marks the first reported death due to the virus in southern Aroostook.
Houlton Regional Hospital officials said Friday, Dec. 5, that testing was being done in five separate locations across southern Aroostook, and that the hospital alone has identified more than 30 new positive cases in the past three weeks.
“We wish to alert the general public that we must be intensely vigilant,” said Shawn Anderson, CEO of Houlton Regional, in a post on the hospital’s Facebook page. “If, up to this point, you haven’t been concerned about COVID-19 in our region, today you should be.”
Anderson confirmed on Monday the first death due to COVID-19 at the hospital, and that over the past several days it has had around five to six patients hospitalized due to the virus. It marks the second death from the virus in Aroostook County since the start of the pandemic. The first reported death was in Fort Kent back in May.
Anderson also cautioned that failure to take precautions during Thanksgiving family gatherings may mean that cases will continue to go up over the next week.
“We’re at a point where we’re seeing new cases every day,” Anderson said. “We’re at a really critical time right now post-Thanksgiving.”
Ellen Bartlett, the infection preventionist at Houlton Regional Hospital, said that since the hospital’s announcement on Friday, several more new cases had been reported at the hospital.
“We’ve had at least five new cases,” said Bartlett. “We’ve continued to see new positives over the weekend.”
As a result, schools and businesses in the southern Aroostook region have announced closures and extensions of online learning as a result of positive cases of COVID-19. At Houlton, Hodgdon, Southern Aroostook and Katahdin high schools classes took an extended Thanksgiving break as a result of the identification of two positive cases in people associated with the school. Classes resumed for in-person learning on Dec. 2 for Houlton and Hodgdon, while Southern Aroostook resumed Monday, Dec. 5. Katahdin remains closed until Dec. 14.
In Smyrna, the owner of the Brookside Inn restaurant announced that the location would be temporarily closed after he tested positive for the virus on Saturday, Dec. 4.
The upward trend in cases reflects the overall increase seen throughout Aroostook county, and in the state of Maine in general, over the past several weeks. According to the Maine Center for Disease Control, 99 individuals in Aroostook County have tested positive for the virus in the last 14 days, with a 3.2 percent positivity rate for all those tested during that time period. After recording just 145 total cases since the start of the pandemic in March, Aroostook has now seen 40 new cases since the start of December, as of Monday, Dec. 7.
The most recent numbers from Maine CDC on cases by zip code, dated Nov. 29, puts the total number of cases recorded in the greater Houlton area — which also includes the towns Hodgdon, Linneus and Littleton — at 32 cases. With the recent outbreak of cases since the start of December, that number is likely to be even higher.
Cases have also been recorded in the southern Aroostook areas around Sherman, Island Falls, Oakfield and New Limerick. The Maine CDC also reports that ZIP codes of areas that are based outside of Aroostook but extend into southern Aroostook, such as Staceyville and Danforth, have also recorded positive cases since the start of the pandemic.
