AUGUSTA, Maine — As Maine’s fight against the COVID-19 virus goes on, there are a growing number of calls for the Maine CDC to report the number of cases in each town or city, or at least report them by zip code.
The CDC has so far not been willing to do tar, but it did promise Monday that there would be some additional detail to the data soon.
Among those wanting to see the town-by-town information is Sen. Ned Claxton, a Democrat from Auburn. Claxton is a retired physician and has teamed up with Republican Rep. Amy Arata of New Gloucester to ask the governor to allow some businesses in rural areas of Androscoggin and Cumberland counties to reopen. Claxton says having that town by town detail would make a very big difference.
“In the letter (to Gov. Mills), it is an encouragement to take it down to zip code level and begin to sort that out,” said Claxton. “I understand the reluctance to identify two people in a small town in northern Maine...but less of a concern looking at numbers in more settled places.”
At Monday’s CDC briefing, Dr. Nirav Shah of the Maine CDC again said the problem to town by town data continues to be the chance of accidentally identifying someone who has the virus. He said the CDC is looking at ways to give more information, as New Hampshire and many other states have already done. Those states provide town-by-town data on COVID-19 cases. Dr. Shah says the problem is with some of Maine’s very small towns, where revealing that a case exists, could lead people to guess who has the virus and violate their medical privacy.
“It's not that we’ve been against the idea, but that we needed to get to a certain number of aggregate cases to show overall case count is large enough start doing this,” he said. “It hasn’t been a question of willingness but has been to have the sufficiently high number of cases we need to have to protect people’s privacy.”
Dr. Shah said Maine has now reached that level, with more than 2,000 total cases and 712 active ones, to soon start releasing more information on cases. He is not promising town-by-town data but says they plan to provide some added detail. He said the CDC hopes to announce that later this week.
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