Maine has travel restrictions placed on visitors from different states because of COVID-19. NH, VT, NY, CT and NJ are all exempt, but MA is not. I crunched some numbers today to figure out why and think I know why. If you look at daily cases per 1M people NY, NJ and MA are all about the same, so I figured there must be another factor they are considering in their metrics.

After digging around on this Maine Tourism report I was able to gather information about the location of residence for visitors to Maine. New York and Massachusetts are neck and neck when it comes to overnight visitors at 22% each. However, when you look at daily visitors for obvious reasons the New York visitors is near zero and Massachusetts makes up 35% of all visitors tied with Maine. If you combine overnight and daily visits Massachusetts accounts for 34% of all visits to Maine, about double the results from New York.

Using the new case numbers for today and converting to values per 1M people and then multiplying against the total visit breakdown per state shows that Massachusetts would bring in 16 new cases per every 1 million visitors to Maine. Next up would be New York with 7, followed by Rhode Island with 4. I’m not quite sure why Rhode Island isn’t exempt, but it does make sense for Massachusetts.

Ski season is right around the corner and I have a sinking feeling that it just isn’t going to be in the cards for us this year. Maybe this fall we will be able to get home COVID-19 tests that we can use every couple weeks before we head up north.