Maine scores near the top in national ranking for COVID-19 health infrastructure

WalletHub U.S. map showing Maine with No. 14 ranking

Courtesy / WalletHub In WalletHub's ranking of states with the best infrastructure for coronavirus, Maine came it at No. 14, outranking all other New England states.

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By Renee Cordes

In a national ranking of states with the best health infrastructure for responding to the coronavirus crisis, Maine came it at No. 14, outshining all other New England states except Vermont.

While COVID-19 has exposed weaknesses in the country's health care system, from supplies to staffing to bed counts, personal finance website WalletHub set out to find the states that were most prepared going into the pandemic.

Researchers compared the 50 states across 14 metrics including public health emergency preparedness funding per capita, public hospital system quality and the the number of hospital beds, emergency centers and services, intensive care unit beds and state and local public health laboratories per capita.

Each metric was graded on a 100-point scale, with a score of 100 representing the best infrastructure. Each state was ranked based on the overall score.

North Dakota topped the list with a total score of 71.37, followed by West Virginia, Mississippi and Tennessee.

Vermont led the New England pack at No. 11, followed by Maine at No. 14. That put them both ahead of Massachusetts (No. 38), Rhode Island (No. 43), New Hampshire (No. 44) and Connecticut, which came in dead last at No. 50.

Massachusetts was found to have the largest percentage of population without insurance, followed by Hawaii and Vermont.

The ranking comes as the cumulative number of COVID-19 cases in Maine reached 2,109 as of Tuesday morning, of which 1,138 patients have recovered and 79 have died, according to the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention website.

Also on Tuesday, Gov. Janet Mills said the Maine Department of Health and Human Services will expand its ability to do contact tracing of the pandemic's spread by enlisting 50 trained volunteers and hiring up to 125 staff for up to a year. The department will also deploy a free alert system to support monitoring and reporting of COVID-19 in Maine, Mills said.

A partnership with Westbrook-based IDEXX Laboratories Inc. (Nasdaq: IDXX), unveiled in early May, significantly expanded the state's testing capacity so that anyone in Maine suspected of having the virus can receive a test, according to officials.