Up to 35 Out-of-State Visitors May Have Unknowingly Infected Mainers With COVID-19
Imagine you feel nothing; everything is right. You're going to go on the family vacation or go to visit grandma up at a cottage just by the water in Maine.
You take a COVID test before you leave insert state here, but you have a schedule to keep, and you feel great! You're having a great time once you get there, swimming laughing with family and friends and all the sudden you get a phone call or an alert on your phone from the CVS mobile app telling you that you have tested positive for COVID-19.
The problem is it's been eight days since you took the original test. You felt nothing, how would you deal at that point?
According to Mount Desert Island Hospital per a Portland Press Herald article, that's precisely what's happened over the past couple of weeks to about 35 visitors to Maine.
Working in conjunction with the CDC, the hospital is trying to do contact tracing to see all the people that these 35 visitors have been in contact with to test them and mitigate the risk, the newspaper stated.
The problem here is so much time has passed, and with Maine having lower numbers as far as the COVID-19 outbreak, there is a false sense of security.
There is no way to tell how many people those 35 people have infected that may have affected other citizens.
"That's quite a dilemma," said Dr. Peter Millard, an epidemiologist who is now medical director at Seaport Community Health Care in Belfast, to the Associated Press as reported in a WGME article. "When somebody has a positive test in, say, Georgia, there is no way that the people in Georgia would know that person went to Maine, so it's not like they can forward it to officials here."
The hospital and the state CDC are encouraging people who may have had positive test results while visiting Maine from other states to come forward so they can do proper contact tracing, according to the Portland Press Herald.
If you know anyone that may fit that criteria, please let them know that they will be helping save countless lives. **This story will be updated.***