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Maine has been gradually lifting its 14-day quarantine requirement for out-of-state visitors, and travelers from five states (New Hampshire, Vermont, New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut) can now enter the state without quarantining u obtain a negative coronavirus test.
The relaxation of the rules, however, has not come without controversy. Last week, the Massachusetts governor questioned why his state was left off the list of states that can freely send travelers to Maine. A Boston Globe columnist wrote a funny article titled “We Used to Be Friends, Maine.” Massachusetts allows Maine residents to visit without quarantining.
The most flexible restrictions for travelers come at the height of the tourism season, with companies across Maine looking to save the summer after losing business due to pandemic-related closings. They also occur when Maine has seen coronavirus cases progress slightly due to spread among young people. Some southern states are seeing record outbreaks.
Nirav Shah, director of the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention, said Monday that, in analyzing whether travelers are allowed into the state, the agency is trying to assess whether conditions in each state are “as safe as Maine ”
The two main metrics for evaluating this, Shah said, are the new case rate and the positivity rate. For the week beginning June 28, Maine saw fewer than 17 new cases per 100,000 people. That’s more than Vermont, New Hampshire, and Connecticut saw during the same period, but less than New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island.
One caveat to using case count numbers to compare the prevalence of the disease in different states is that test levels still vary in the US Over the past week, for example, Maine conducted just over 14,000 tests, which translates to approximately 1,050 tests per 100,000 people, while New York performed 2,150 tests per 100,000 people.
The positivity rate helps explain the disparate test rates between states. In general, a lower positivity rate means that the disease is less frequent. Two of the states that had more new cases than Maine when adjusted for population, New York and New Jersey, also had lower positivity rates, suggesting that their higher case rates may be related in part to more evidence.
Using a seven-day moving average, Maine’s positivity rate for the past week was 1.6 percent. Rhode Island saw approximately the same positivity rate as Maine, while New Hampshire’s was slightly higher. Massachusetts had the highest positivity rate in the region during that time, at 2.3 percent, according to data compiled by the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center.
Shah said Monday that the Maine CDC continues to examine data from Massachusetts and Rhode Island, among other states, and that it could allow travelers from those states or others if the numbers improve.
“The data is changing, and as the data changes, we want to balance our analysis to match that,” Shah said.
