It's Thursday, September three. I'm Oscar Ramirez from the Daily Dive podcast in Los Angeles, and this is Reopening America. As the pandemic worked its way through the United States, Hawaii had a handle on its cases early on. Recently, however, case counts and hospitalizations have started to creep up as a result of complacency by residents and a lack of preparation by officials. Quarantine measures for travelers are still in place, and the opening of the state has continued to be delayed.
Alice Miranda Olstein, healthcare reporter at Politico, joins us for what happened to Hawaii. Thanks for joining us, Alice, absolutely, thank you. I wanted to talk about Hawaii throughout the coronavirus pandemic. They started off very well. The case number was very low of coronavirus, but just very recently the
numbers have started to go up. There really has been a kind of seesaw effect with the way they've open stuff, closed things, and obviously the effect that it's having on the economy, since they're heavily reliant on tourism, has been all over the place. So what is going on with Hawaii? As I mentioned they start off so well and things have gotten worse since the summer began, So what's going on there with way, So, just a few months ago, Hawaii had the fewest cases per capita in the whole country.
They obviously have some geographic advantages. It's easier to close your borders and know who's coming in when you are an island in the middle of ocean than easier than other states. So they took a lot of precautions early on and it really paid off, and their case count was extremely low. And then they did not use that time period to build up these pessing and contact tracing infrastructure necessary for a surge, and inevitably a surge came.
Once businesses reopened, people gathered together again. It really took off over the July fourth weekend. People not wearing masks, people gathering together, and the state didn't have enough testing and contact tracing services and the workforce needed. And now
they're scrambling to build it up. Now the generals flew all the way there to open up a testing site, a surge testing site, and now they're scrambling to contain things and a lot of officials there and folks we talked to in the health world say this have been avoided if we did this preparation ahead of time rather than doing it after things have gotten this bad. It's kind of the same tale that we saw throughout the country various states who started off well, then they got complacent,
and the public kind of got complacent as well. Nobody really prepared for that second wave or another surge, and then boom, you're hit with a bunch of rising cases. So in Hawaii, as you mentioned, one of the biggest things was the contact tracing effort. They said the state needs about four hundred contact tracers. They have about a hundred, So I know that's been one of the biggest points of contention there, definitely, and so they are hiring more now,
trying to build that out now train people. But again, this is challenging work and it takes time to hire and train people. And the frustration a lot of folks communicated to us is that we could have known ahead of time that this would have been necessary and done this preparation work when cases were low and we had a little breathing room, instead of doing it now once we're really under the gun. So what were some of the other points that went wrong. From my reading in
the article, the administration got a little complacent. And what they did, though, was they started opening up some of this indoor dining stuff the salons before doing things in outdoor spaces like opening up some of the beaches and hiking trails. So they kind of did it opposite. The public health experts I talked to are really baffled by this, and this has been an issue in other states as well.
So the virus spread most easily in enclosed environments. If we're in a restaurant indoors, talking and eating, it's much easier for it to spread and for people to get infected than in outdoor spaces where the air is circulating and the virus can disperse and the sunlight helps as well. And yet Hawaii opened up people could go to malls and restaurants and nail salons before they could go to
some of the beaches and parks and hiking trails. And this is just the opposite of what public health guidance recommends. What has been the response from Governor David E. Gay I know he is still saying, well, you know, we did a lot of good things for the state, but you know, our numbers are low, and still relatively to the country, the numbers are very low there. But he kind of threw it on the public, saying they got complacent, and as you mentioned earlier, fourth of July was a
big one. Everybody went out and started parting. Additionally, some state leaders have said no amount of contact tracing could have prevented this. The response from the public health community is yes, but it could have massively helped. I mean, every time you contact someone and say you were exposed, please stay home, that breaks the chain of transmission and
prevents it from spreading even further. And so even if there would have been some surge due to for the July and people getting complaintent and not wearing masks, contact racing always helped. So yes, but I think it is very telling. This is sort of breaking news. The head of the health department just resigned one day after our story ran. He's been there for decades and he just retired.
So I think that is a sign that there is somewhat of a reckoning around the state's officials response to this. So what kind of restrictions do they have right now? Because I know for a long time they were doing the you know, if you arrived into the state, you had to do a fourteen day quarantine. Early on, they
did lockdowns and stay at home orders. It seems like they have some of those in place again, I think so they're putting them in place just for Oahu where it's the worst right now, but it could extend to the other islands depending on how things go. So there is new stay at home order there. Bars are closing, and like you said, the economy is so heavily dependent
on tourism that folks are really suffering there. The unemployment rate is in the double digits, and the date for reopening to tourism keeps getting pushed back further and further as these outbreaks are getting worse and hospitalizations are way up. And even though the state has had a very low number of deaths throughout the pandemic, a big chunk of those have happened in the last couple of weeks, which
is a very troubling sign. Hopefully they can get it together and then, you know, as we've just been saying, since they're so heavily relying on tourism, they can open the state back up so that they can get that back in order as well. Alice Miranda Olstein, healthcare reporter at Politico. Thank you very much for joining us. Thank you. I'm Oscar Ameres and this has been reopening America. Don't
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