Meet Christiane Northrup, Maine's Doctor of Disinformation

Maine's very own celebrity doctor, Christiane Northrup of Women's Bodies, Women's Selves fame, has called about by US Senators and banned from Instagram for being one of the "disinformation dozen," a group of anti-vaccine propagandists said to be responsible for nearly two thirds of such content on social media. But, as I described in the Maine Sunday Telegram last week, Northrup's message is much farther "out there" then you'll probably expect.

She's been telling her followers -- and in-person Q-adjacent conference attendees -- to stay away from vaccinated people because they're allegedly contagious with malignant vaccine particles that have turned them -- and maybe you -- into remote-controllable slaves via the micro robots (and two-way 5G antennas) injected into them with the vaccine... all as part of a global plot by an elite to somehow advantage Bill and Melinda Gates (together and separately, one assumes) via the medium of cryptocurrency. And that's just the start of it.

Meanwhile, Maine has been undergoing an ICU surge from unvaccinated people -- many of them under 50 -- who are coming down with very acute forms of COVID-19, a topic I wrote about later in the week in the Portland Press Herald.

The Year of Living Distantly

We're one year into the global pandemic and I, at least, feel my heart rate increase when I think back to those scary days in late March and early April 2020 when nobody knew for sure what was going to happen next. Thankfully it appears clear we're at the beginning of the end, and we didn't end up living in The Road.

Among Americans, we Mainers have gotten off lightly, but it's still be a wrenching experience that will transform society. So for the anniversary of the pandemic I took stock in how the pandemic effected and changed different sectors of life, from the elderly who paid the most terrible price to schools, restaurants, hospitals, and the performing arts. You can read it all in this week's Maine Sunday Telegram, or online here.

Covid-19 continues surging in Maine, stressing contact tracing, hospitals

Happy Thanksgiving. Hopefully you're all spending it, as I am, in small gatherings because Covid-19 is exploding across the United States and until late January it doesn't appear there will be any cogent federal response, Hang tight.

Trends aren't good here in Maine, even though we still have the 49th lowest prevalence in the country after Hawaii. As I reported in the past few days for the Portland Press Herald, last week we hit new all time highs in hospitalizations, with medical centers in the eastern and central part of the state bearing the brunt of the burden. Intensive Care Unit capacity is rapidly becoming a front and center concern, two or three weeks ahead of whatever post-Thanksgiving boost the disease receives here. In yesterday's paper I reported on how the Maine CDC is already having to scale back the scope of contact tracing efforts, though they remain much more robust here than in most other states, definitely to include neighboring New Hampshire, which has officially given up on containment. 

As of yesterday, Eastern Maine Medical Center in Bangor had hit 27 inpatients, quadruple their peak during the spring surge. Should have updated hospitalization tallies for you tomorrow, which I'll post here as an update.

As I wrote Nov. 16, models show the trends here in Maine will get worse over the next few weeks.

Stay safe, wash your hands, and wear your masks.

Covid hospitalizations surge to record levels in Maine

I monitor the Covid-19 inpatient trends at Maine's hospitals on a weekly basis and this past week was especially bad. Maine, which has been one of the most Covid-limited states in the U.S., just broke its all-time record for inpatients and, as I report in tomorrow's Portland Press Herald, much of the growth is occurring in places it wasn't present during the spring and early summer surges: eastern Maine, central Maine, and at small hospitals scattered around rural Maine.

Details in the story.

New allegations against a Maine "medical supply" company led by man facing fraud indictments

It's Election Day 2020. Stay safe and, if you pray, do so for the survival of the American Experiment.

In my Maine reporting, I've been focused on the other crisis facing the world, the now-resurgent pandemic, and over the past few days I've been writing follow-ups on a story I broke in March about a Portland, Maine LLC headed by a man with a five-county criminal fraud indictment against him that had suddenly jumped into the medical supply business, trading in the shortage items desperately needed by hospitals and first responders.

Noble Partners, doing business as Noble Medical Supply, was the subject of my Portland Press Herald stories Friday and today, as allegations surfaced against the company and its founder Sean C. Grady. (Its customer-facing face is Diane Russell, former Democratic state legislator for Portland, who spoke at the 2016 DNC.) 

In Friday's story, news of a federal law suit against Noble and Grady in Florida; accusations of unreturned deposits for undelivered orders in Florida and California; a disgruntled sales representative and damaged masks in Texas; and, on the Internet, the company's website having been taken down by its provider and replaced with a demand for more than $15,000 in unpaid debts and a summary of Grady's legal problems in Maine and New Hampshire.

In today's story, the owner of a local Portland distillery lays out a story of a hand sanitizer production deal gone almost immediately bad, leaving his company out more than $150,000.

Separately, I also had this update on an uptick in Covid-19 hospitalizations in Maine and the unusual geography of that uptick. And to round out pandemic-related news coverage, in case you missed it, there is also this in-depth profile of Maine "superspreader wedding" pastor Todd Bell from Sunday's paper.

I last wrote about Noble Partners at the end of March, when they delivered a van load of masks and other supplies to some customers in Massachusetts as promised.

More on politics and the election anon.

Coronavirus in Maine: York, Oxford county enter danger zone

Maine and its northern New England neighbors, New Hampshire and Vermont, have been the three healthiest states for almost the entire pandemic to date, with relatively low prevalence, hospitalizations, and per capita deaths. But, owing in no small part to a defiant independent fundamentalist Baptist preacher and his followers, the disease is poised to spin out of control in interior York County. The Rumford area in Oxford county is also raising red flags.

In this week's Maine Sunday Telegram I had a detailed update on these developments and the state of the pandemic in Maine as the cold weather season approaches. 

In the past week and a half I also reported on staff getting infected at Waterville's Inland Hospital, but fortunately that appears to be under control.

Maine pandemic updates: testing delays, low hospitalizations, few non-residents testing positive

A few recent updates on the pandemic situation in Maine:

Major national testing labs have been overwhelmed by the pandemic's surge in the Deep South and El Norte, and that's caused one to two week delays in getting COVID-19 results via many Maine providers who rely on these labs, including CVS, Maine Urgent Care, and Intermed. Fortunately, the state's strategy of increasing in-state capacity has limited the damage. The story is in tomorrow's Press Herald.

As of last Thursday, COVID-19 hospitalizations had hit a record low in Maine. That's great news in a state that has the third lowest per capita prevalence of the disease in the country. This usually lags exposures by two or three weeks and is not effected by how much and how well you do testing, so is a very solid indication that Maine was doing well at the end of June. I'll have a fresh update on this metric tomorrow.

And as of July 18 -- the latest date the Maine CDC could provide data for -- the number of non-residents testing positive remained low, and increasing at a rate of only 0.7 per day since the start of July. This is also welcome news as the most likely way in which the pandemic could turn worse here is via the introduction of infections from high prevalence regions to our south during the summer tourist season,.

Coronavirus in Maine at the onset of high tourist season

As the coronavirus spreads across the southern and western United States -- a topic I'll have more to say about tomorrow -- Mainers are simultaneously kicking off their summer tourist season, lifting Covid-19 restrictions, and hoping the state can keep the prevalence of the disease low, where it has been for much of the pandemic owing to low population density and an effective lockdown.

Two updates on how things are playing out here:

First, in today's Portland Press Herald: there's been a recent quadrupling in the pace of new non-resident cases here, though starting from a low level. With concerns about contact tracing of such individuals -- theoretically performed by public health departments in their native state or county -- one Maine community has created their own testing regimen for servers, cashiers, clerks and other front-line tourism workers.

Also in today's paper, your exclusive weekly update on covid hosptializations in the state, by hospital.  Good news: another fairly quiet week, though with upticks at some of the state's largest hospitals.

Two developments I covered in recent days regarding the pandemic here in Maine.

In this week's Maine Sunday Telegram, I revisited the issue of Maine's Covid-19 testing capacity and strategy in light of this past week's announcement by Gov. Janet Mills that the state lab would soon be quadrupling its capacity. The good news: experts say the new capacity (and the testing strategy associated with it) will put Maine in a very good position as it tries to keep ahead of the disease during the phased reopening of the economy. This was very much not the case when I reported on this issue a month ago.

My weekly update on Covid-19 hospitalizations-by-hospital was in Saturday's Portland Press Herald and contained more good news: hospitalizations remain flat or declining across Maine, including at Maine Medical Center and the hospitals in hard-hit Androscoggin County, suggesting many people who were infected by the coronavirus two or three weeks earlier have not been acutely affected.

In unrelated news, my sixth book, Union: The Struggle to Forge the Story of United States Nationhood, goes on sale tomorrow, Tuesday, June 16. For details on the (now virtual) launch event and signing here in Maine and other virtual events and radio appearances, see this post.

Maine pandemic: zip-code data released; hospitalizations, testing updates

In this week of civil rights protests, police violence, and militarized deployments in major cities it's been hard to remember there's a deadly, once-in-a-century pandemic going on, but amazingly there is.

Here are a few developments I covered this week on the pandemic here in Maine.

Wednesday morning I reported on how Maine remains the only state in the country unable to compile negative testing data (and, thus, the positivity rate) each day, and why this is a problem. (It's an issue we've been covering for weeks.) Good news: later that day, the agency quietly updated its cumulative testing data for second day running - making it possible to subtract cases from the day before and calculate the rate. It also updated it Thursday and Friday, so it looks like it may have made good on promises to start reporting the data every day, though its not archived on their website and prior data hasn't yet been broken out by day. Stay tuned for a story on this.

Wednesday evening, the agency began reporting cumulative case counts by zip code for some parts of the state. My analysis was up at the Press Herald Thursday morning and notes that a zip code in Lewiston has the highest number of cases, one in downtown Portland has the highest prevalence; that Portland as a whole has the most cases, but only the fifth highest per capita load, and that the northern Maine town of Medway, of all places, has the highest per capita load of any municipality.

Our weekly update on Covid-19 hospitalizations-by-hospital was up on Friday and showed inpatient levels generally flat, except at the state's largest hospital, Maine Medical Center, where they fell dramatically from pandemic peak levels (c. 35/day) to 10, the lowest since March 24, when the crisis was just beginning in Maine. Story discusses why this is and updates recent county-level new case trends in southern Maine.

More to come. Thanks for reading, and if you value what this pretty small newspaper does, consider supporting it, so it can continue.

Covid hospitalizations return to peak levels in Southern Maine

The number of Covid-19 inpatients at Portland's major hospitals returned to the peak levels of early April last week, data collected directly from Maine's hospitals show. York County's largest hospital also saw increases.

The story -- the latest in my exclusive weekly Press Herald round-ups of the hospitalization situation in Maine -- follows weeks of steadily increasing Covid case counts in Cumberland and Androscoggin counties, suggesting the disease is having a resurgence as social distancing requirements are loosened. The upward case trends in these counties began before the Maine CDC increased testing and the hospitalization trends, of course, are not a product of how many tests were performed (which is why they are valuable to have.) York counties trends are also not encouraging, but Maine's other 13 counties looked relatively good, including Penobscot County (Bangor).

The story also includes an update on the promises the Maine CDC made last week in regards to releasing better data on the pandemic; short answer is they're still working on it.

The spike in hospitalizations in Portland -- now in its second week running -- followed more than a month of declining of flat cases in much of April and the beginning of May, when Gov. Janet Mills began the phased reopening of parts of Maine's (heavily damaged) economy.

Exclusive: pandemic appears resurgent in southern Maine

To kick off your Memorial Day weekend unpleasantly, I have this story in today's Portland Press Herald showing that Covid-19 has been having a clear resurgence in two of Maine's most populous counties, Cumberland (e.g.: Greater Portland) and Androscoggin (includes Lewiston-Auburn) and doesn't look out for the count by any means in York County, which is close to southern New Hampshire and eastern Massachusetts, which both have far higher prevalence of the disease than anywhere in Maine.

Talked to Maine CDC's director late Friday afternoon who agreed the weeks-long new case trends -- detailed in the article -- were worrisome and had started before Maine ramped up testing levels. Two top national experts said the state shouldn't be reopening these counties further until the new case counts were under control.

Also in today's paper, my weekly exclusive update on hospitalizations, hospital-by-hospital, day-by-day, show a sharp increase in Covid-19 inpatients at Portland's two major hospitals, Maine Medical Center and Mercy. (Curiously, CMMC in Lewiston did not have such a trend.)

Enjoy your weekend, but stay safe, wear masks when around people outside your bubble, and keep reading.

Maine Covid-19 hospitalizations contine to fall for third week

In the absence of widespread testing, its difficult to know if trends in new pandemic cases are an indication of the actual spread of the disease, or if the ups and downs have to do with who is and isn't being tested. But hospitalizations are less fuzzy: if you're really sick, you probably wind up there whether somebody tested you when you weren't symptomatic or not.

Is I've been gathering, combining, and publishing daily confirmed Covid-19 patient counts for each of Maine's hospitals for each of the past three weeks and am pleased to report -- in tomorrow's Portland Press Herald -- that patient counts continue to gently decline or plateau at almost all Maine hospitals. You can also read my report from a week ago on the patient count, which included some (still relevant) expert feedback on what it means: that social distancing is indeed succeeding in flattening the curve and protecting our hospitals from being overrun.

Bonus blog factoid: as of Thursday, April 30, the hospitals that have had the most Covid-19 inpatient burden (measured by cumulative patient days) were:

1. Maine Medical Center (Portland) - 879 patient days
2. Southern Maine Health Care (Biddeford) - 200 patient days
3. MaineGeneral (Augusta) - 152 patient days
4. Mid Coast Hospital (Brunswick) - 138 patient days
5. York Hospital (York) - 122 patient days
6. Mercy Hospital (Portland) - 88 patient days
7. Central Maine Medical Center (Lewiston) - 77 patient days
8. Eastern Maine Medical Center (Bangor) - 73 patient days
9. Waldo Memorial (Belfast) - 16 patient days
10. Inland (Waterville) - 8 patient days

My first dispatch on hospital counts was here.

Allocations of N95 masks from federal stockpile weren't distributed to states on per capita basis

As states have scrounged for supplies of N95 masks and other critical personal protective equipment, federal authorities have repeatedly said the state-by-state allocations from the Strategic National Stockpile were made on a per capita basis.

This is not the case.

My analysis of the data is in today's Portland Press Herald. Teaser: it's not based on political loyalty or apparent pandemic exposure either, but the federal government is unwilling to explain what logic was in fact used.

Maine's Congressional delegation is largely outraged by the lack of transparency, except for the one Republican of the four, Sen. Susan Collins, whose office wouldn't answer questions about it.

Details in the story.

[Update, 4/23/20: This story was picked up by the national Associated Press wire and also featured in today's USA Today News from the Fifty States feature.]

I wrote on another, distinctly handled, federal stockpile issue last week: the allocation of ventilators.

Covid-19 hospitalizations in much of Maine have flattened

The effort to "flatten the curve" is literally an attempt to reduce the spread of the pandemic so as to prevent a sudden spike in critically ill patients that overwhelms hospitals, their very limited supply of personal protective equipment, and scarce ventilators to keep the most sick alive.

In an exclusive story in today's Portland Press Herald, I report that that effort here in Maine has worked, at least for now.

I collected confirmed Covid-19 in-patient counts directly from the three largest hospital networks in the state back to the start of the epidemic here, broken out by individual hospital so as to reveal the trend lines in different parts of the state. The very good news: instead of the spike Maine hospitals were bracing for two weeks ago, inpatient numbers have crested and flattened almost everywhere, and had a modest decline in several hospitals, including Maine Medical Center, which has handled roughly half of all hospitalizations in this state.

But, as you can read in the story, while this is welcome news in terms of protecting our hospitals, it's in no way an indication that we can safely scale back the social distancing measures that have blunted the disease's spread. And the unfolding crisis in the state's long term care facilities could undo this positive trend if state officials and health care workers are unable to head it off. Indeed, Maine CDC director Nirav Shah told me last night that's the scenario that keeps him up at night.

[Update, 5/1/2020: I revisited the data a week later and a week after that; hospitalizations continued to gently fall or plateau.]