This story will be updated.
Four more Mainers were killed when health officials reported 700 new cases of coronavirus across the state on Friday.
According to the Friday report, the total number of coronavirus cases in Maine brings to 24,901 according to the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention. It is higher from 24,201 Thursday.
Of these, 21,144 were positively confirmed, while 3,757 were classified as ‘probable cases’, the CDC reported in Maine.
Recent deaths include a woman in her 90s from Cumberland County; a woman in her 80s from Penobscot County; a man in his 90s from Washington County; and a woman in her 80s from Washington County. The global death toll now stands at 351.
As of Friday, 30,877 Mainers have been vaccinated against COVID-19, or 2.02 percent of the population. Maine ranks third in the country for the rate of vaccination, according to Bloomberg’s vaccination tracker, which lags behind only West Virginia by 2.50 percent and South Dakota by 2.14 percent. The rapid pace comes despite the fact that the state is receiving thousands less doses than expected.
Information on where new cases were detected was not available Friday morning due to technical issues, the Maine CDC said. The current number of active cases was also not available.
Maine’s average of seven days for new coronavirus cases was 426.9 on Thursday, up from 431.6 a day earlier and 460.6 a week earlier, but up from 172 a month earlier.
So far, 1,080 Mainers have been hospitalized at some point with COVID-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus. As of Friday, 188 people are currently hospitalized, with 48 in critical care and 19 in ventilators.
There were 1,177,522 negative test results out of the 1,207,730 total. About 2.4 percent of all tests returned positive, Maine CDC data show.
The coronavirus was the worst hit in Cumberland County, where 7,233 cases were reported and where the majority of virus deaths – 97 – were concentrated. Other cases have been reported in Androscoggin (2,667), Aroostook (617), Franklin (451), Hancock (550), Kennebec (1,812), Knox (370), Lincoln (301), Oxford (1,115), Penobscot ( 2 050) Provinces of Piscataquis (117), Sagadahoc (387), Somerset (743), Waldo (380), Washington (377) and York (530).
As of Friday morning, the coronavirus had infected 19,990,390 people in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands and the US Virgin Islands, and caused 346,013 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University of Medicine.