New England’s getting hammered by COVID-19 these days.

Only two states — Rhode Island and New Hampshire — have a higher infection rate than Maine, where the disease is slamming rural counties. Connecticut and Massachusetts are also in the top six.

Three Maine counties are among the six worst counties in the nation for having the most cases per 100,000 residents in the last seven days, according to The New York Times’ tracker. Franklin County is coping with the fourth highest rate of new infections in the country.

It’s no surprise that soaring infection rates — they’ve nearly doubled in the past two weeks in Maine — have led to a new high for the number of Mainers on ventilators at the state’s hospitals.

The Maine Center of Disease Control & Prevention also announced Thursday that 27 more Mainers have died of the disease, most of them added to the tally after a review of November vital records. Four of them were from Androscoggin County and three were from either Franklin or Oxford counties.

This news comes before a single case of the fast-spreading omicron variant has been detected in Maine.

Dr. Nirav Shah, the head of the Maine Center for Disease Control & Prevention said it is “just a matter of time” before the variant turns up in the state. He told a briefing Thursday the agency is acting on the assumption it is “already here.”

Though unvaccinated people make up only a quarter of Maine’s 1.3 million people, they constitute two-thirds of the people in critical care units in the state’s hospitals, Shah said, and “80% or 90%” of those on ventilators.

The counties in Maine with the best vaccination rates are also posting far better overall case numbers than the ones such as Franklin, Aroostook and Piscataquis counties that are among the nation’s hardest-hit places in recent days.

The best thing individuals can do to protect themselves, Shah said, is get vaccinated. It is also, he said, “increasingly important” to get a booster shot as well, once they become eligible.

The booster “restores the performance of the vaccine to a strong level,” Shah said and is an important tool to keep COVID-19 at bay, or at least minimize its impact, if a fully vaccinated person comes down with a case.

It’s not all bleak news, however.

Shah bemoaned that, “sometimes I just feel like a perpetual thrower of wet blankets,” before touting growing success in getting more people vaccinated.

“We are continuing to make strong progress on vaccines,” Shah said.

He said the number of daily doses given each day in Maine has reached the high levels seen last May, in large part because people are seeking boosters six months after their eligibility.

There’s still a lot of room for improvement.

Shah said that about 40% of the population older than 18 has gotten a booster, which leaves tens of thousands of people who got vaccinated not yet boosted as well.

“We’ve got more work to do on the booster front,” Shah said.

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