Kristine Thibodeau jogs in the rain Friday after leaving work at Central Maine Medical Center on Main Street in Lewiston. CMMC has not had a confirmed COVID-19 patient in the ICU in nearly a month. Andree Kehn/Sun Journal

LEWISTON – Providers at Lewiston’s two hospitals are breathing a sigh of relief as the downward trend in the number of patients hospitalized with confirmed COVID-19 is entering its second month.

Hospitalizations at Central Maine Medical Center and St. Mary’s Regional Medical Center have mostly decreased since a major spike in cases that filled the hospital’s COVID units last spring. As of Friday morning, CMMC reported two patients under its care – neither in the intensive care unit – and St. Mary’s did not have any. The patient counts only include cases where COVID-19 has been confirmed through testing.

“It feels good,” Dr. Zachary Mueller, a hospitalist and associate chief of adult hospital medicine at CMMC, said Friday. “We went from being really in the thick of things about three months ago to now I really feel like we can breathe a sigh of relief and that we’re headed in the right direction.”

It’s been nearly one month since a confirmed COVID-19 patient has required critical care and nearly two months since a patient has been on a ventilator at the Lewiston hospital.

From mid-March through early June, providers at CMMC cared for an average of 13 patients per day. On some days, particularly from late April into mid-May, there were more than 20 patients in the COVID-19 unit, the majority of whom needed intensive care and some were on a ventilator.

And that does not include patients with suspected cases of COVID-19 that are pending test results. Suspected, or probable, cases are treated the same way as confirmed cases, Mueller said, meaning that those patients also need to be isolated and that providers follow heightened disease control protocols, such as donning full personal protective equipment.

But now, the Lewiston hospitals appear to be faring much better than other hospitals in the state where most of the COVID patients are in intensive care.

At Maine Medical Center in Portland, the state’s largest hospital, on 16 of the past 21 days every COVID patient there was in the ICU, according to the Portland Press Herald. Over the same period, 86% of Maine Med’s confirmed COVID-19 patients were in intensive care.

Mueller said he started noticing the shift during a rotation in the COVID unit in early June.

“It was a point where the entire service went from being a fully COVID service to the numbers being low enough that you started seeing non-COVID patients on that service. And that was the first time we’d seen that in a long time.”

Slight blips in St. Mary’s in-patient count in the past couple of weeks are insignificant when considering that for most of the two weeks prior, there were no COVID-19 patients and the average number of patients over a one-week period never went above 2.3 per day.

By Friday, the in-patient count was back down to zero.

“With no positive patients it looks like the days prior to COVID,” St. Mary’s spokesperson Steve Costello said Friday morning.

The good news comes the same day that state health officials reported no new cases in central and western Maine and in fact, Androscoggin County’s cumulative case count was decreased by one since Thursday.

“The most likely reasons for the change are that a case previously listed as probable tested negative and therefore became not a case or that case investigation determined that the individual lived in a different county,” said Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention spokesperson Robert Long.

There were nine new cases across the state and one additional death, a woman in her 80s or older from Penobscot County. A death of a resident of Androscoggin, Franklin and Oxford counties has not been reported since July 1.

Case trends in central and western Maine have improved in a one-week period. While Franklin County was experiencing a slight surge in cases at the start of the month, the seven-day average of new daily cases per 10,000 residents decreased by about 61% over the past week, to 0.24 cases per 10,000 individuals on Friday.

The seven-day average per capita in Oxford County decreased by 50% in the past week to 0.1 cases per 10,000 residents, which is lower than the statewide average of 0.14 cases.

Androscoggin County’s case rates decreased only slightly, from 0.26 cases per 10,000 residents over a seven-day period on July 2 to 0.25 cases Friday. But compared to four weeks ago, the average number of cases has declined by over a third and by 91% since mid-May.

Over the same eight-week period, the seven-day average of new cases per capita in Franklin County decreased by 79% and by 91% in Oxford County as of Friday.

On the vaccination front, 59.9% of eligible individuals – those 12 years and older – in Androscoggin County are fully vaccinated. That puts Androscoggin County eighth out of Maine’s 16 counties for getting shots into arms and out of the bottom half of the state for what might be the first time since the vaccine rollout began late last year.

Of those eligible to receive the vaccine, just under 57% of residents of Franklin and Oxford counties are fully vaccinated. Statewide, 67% of eligible Maine people are fully vaccinated.

“People are getting their vaccines, we’re doing great as a state that way,” Mueller, from CMMC, said. “And I think that’s really making a difference. And we’re seeing that. So, I think there’s a cautious optimism.”