BANGOR, Maine (AP) Maine is starting the week with more than a dozen outbreaks of COVID-19 in schools, and many schools are testing to mitigate the risk.
As of Friday, 384 of Maine’s 720 public and private schools had signed up for pool testing with Concentric, a branch of Boston-based Ginkgo Bioworks, spokesperson Joseph Fridman told the Bangor Daily News.
The program calls for student tests to be pooled and sent to a lab in Massachusetts for PCR tests. If there’s a positive test for a school, then individual students will be tested.
The school outbreaks come amid a surge in infections tied to the delta variant, which is spreading in Maine.
The seven-day rolling average of daily new cases in Maine has risen over the past two weeks from 246 new cases per day on Aug. 28 to 349 new cases per day on Saturday.
