The year of living distantly
Maine weathered the pandemic better than most states, but it will leave a lasting impact on us.
Brianna Soukup/Staff Photographer
For weeks the threat had been approaching, a violent storm looming on the horizon, one that had led Chinese authorities to seal off a swath of their country and overwhelmed northern Italy’s hospitals and morgues and forced the army to deploy to process the dead. In Boston, store shelves were being picked clean of cleaning supplies, frozen foods, bottled water and even masks, despite public health experts advising – wrongly – that people who weren’t sick needn’t wear them.
The year of living distantly
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The year of living distantly
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Brianna Soukup/Staff Photographer
As the pandemic summer drew to a close, things looked good for Maine. By almost every metric, the state had kept COVID-19 at bay through the tourist season: Per capita case rates, hospitalizations and deaths were all among the lowest in the country. Five and a half months in, Maine had flattened the curve and then bent it into the ground.
But over the five and a half months that followed, the dam finally broke, spreading the coronavirus to nearly every nook and cranny of Maine. State officials went from reporting a few dozen cases a day to several hundred. Hospitalizations soared to more than 200 at one time, more than triple the worst day of the spring wave. More deaths from the disease were reported in the first two weeks in January than in March, April, May and June combined.