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.
COLIN WOODARD is a New York Times bestselling author, historian and award-winning journalist. He is the author of seven books that have been translated into a dozen foreign languages and inspired an NBC television drama. He is currently Director of Nationhood Lab at the Pell Center for International Relations and Public Affairs at Salve Regina University. As State and National Affairs Writer at Maine's Portland Press Herald, he won a 2012 George Polk Award and was a finalist for a 2016 Pulitzer Prize. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Politico, The Economist, Smithsonian and dozens of other major publications.