| As of Thursday, there are now 796 confirmed cases of the new coronavirus spread across 15 of Maine’s counties, according to the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention. The statewide death toll has risen to 27. The latest deaths involved a woman in her 70s from Waldo County, a man in his 70s from York County and a woman in her 80s from York County. Forty-seven Mainers are currently hospitalized with COVID-19, the illness caused by the coronavirus, and 20 of them are in critical condition and seven on ventilators. Another 333 have fully recovered from the coronavirus. Androscoggin became the fourth county in Maine where community transmission has been confirmed. Only one Maine county — Piscataquis — has no confirmed cases of the virus. Here is the latest on the coronavirus and its impact in Maine. — The Maine CDC will provide an update on the coronavirus later today. The BDN will livestream the briefing. — Falmouth by the Sea is now the fifth long-term care facility in Maine to experience an outbreak of the respiratory infection that has caused a global pandemic. Three residents and one staff member at the 65-bed facility have tested positive for the coronavirus. — As long-term care facilities have restricted outside visitors, residents have stopped receiving in-person visits from their loved ones. Instead, relatives must rely on staff to help arrange visits from outside a window or through the screen of a smartphone. The physical separation is taking a toll on families that crave connection during the current crisis. — Gov. Janet Mills paused some evictions of residential and commercial tenants in an executive order on Thursday and created a $5 million rent relief program, offering some reprieve to those struggling to pay rent during the economic slowdown caused by the coronavirus outbreak. The Democratic governor’s announcement falls in line with comments she made last week that she would take a “targeted approach” to prevent evictions during the civil state of emergency. The order applies strictly to cases of evictions caused by the pandemic, such as business shutdowns or layoffs of residential tenants. — The Mills administration held eight remote meetings with members of the Legislature over the past month. Neither the Legislature nor the administration provided advance notice to the public that the meetings were happening, and they provided no way for members of the public to participate — all violations of the state’s open meetings laws. — Leisa Bouchard has been living on the banks of the Penobscot River in Bangor since she was evicted last spring and couldn’t find another landlord to rent from before her housing voucher expired. When winter arrived, she stayed warm in a tent she built from a tarp and wooden planks she found along the railroad tracks that abut the water. Now, a pandemic has shut down the society she has been trying to rejoin for nearly a year, putting vulnerable people like her at even greater risk by restricting access to the public spaces they rely on to use the bathroom and buy cheap meals. — Maine Craft Distilling will start producing hand sanitizer and channeling donations to nonprofits serving Maine communities in response to the coronavirus. It has hired five new employees, who now work at the distiller’s Washington Avenue distillery and Public House in Portland to assist with its new production line. Hundreds of customers have been visiting on a daily basis to pick up hand sanitizer. — President Donald Trump, a Republican, unveiled his administration’s plans to ease social distancing requirements on a call Thursday with the nation’s governors. The new guidelines are aimed at clearing the way for an easing of restrictions in areas with low transmission of the coronavirus, while keeping them in place in harder-hit locations. Maine’s two senators, Republican Susan Collins and independent Angus King, have been named to a presidential task force to advise on reopening the U.S. economy from the coronavirus-induced shutdown. — As of early Friday morning, the coronavirus has sickened 671,425 people in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands and the U.S. Virgin Islands, as well as caused 33,286 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University of Medicine. — Elsewhere in New England, there have been 1,245 coronavirus deaths in Massachusetts, 971 in Connecticut, 105 in Rhode Island, 35 in Vermont and 34 in New Hampshire.
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