USA: How Hawaii became a rare COVID success story
By Melanie Warner
In mid-February, Hawaii did not yet have any recorded cases of Covid-19, and only 15 infections had been confirmed throughout the United States. But Josh Green, the lieutenant governor, and a practicing emergency room doctor, was worried. He recently had learned that a man from Japan had spent nine days in the state and then tested positive for the virus upon returning home to Nagoya. The man, apparently, was sick—and contagious—toward the end of his vacation. He and his wife, who would later test positive herself, stayed in two hotels, one on Maui and one in Waikiki. They got in rental cars, went shopping in Chinatown, ate out at more than half a dozen restaurants, and met a friend in Honolulu for coffee.
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But a catastrophe never came. Instead of a massive, uncontrolled outbreak, Hawaii has recorded the fewest Covid-19 cases per capita in the country. As of this writing, just one person per 100,000 has died (17 in total), and 54 per 100,000 have tested positive (762 in total). By comparison, New Hampshire and Rhode Island, two states with similar population counts, have caseloads of 406 and 1,546 per 100,000, respectively. For six weeks in April and May, new cases in Hawaii didn’t top five a day. At the beaches, where mask-free residents gather largely without tourists, you can almost start to forget about a virus that has upended lives across the globe.
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Few people look to the United States for coronavirus success stories, instead singling out South Korea, New Zealand, Iceland or Germany. But as America tries to navigate its way out of the first wave and considers the possibility of a second in the fall, Hawaii’s experience offers hope that, with the right efforts taken at the right time, the virus is containable. It also reveals the enduring challenge of trying to shake Covid-19: Since businesses and parks reopened in late May, the state has seen a recent, noticeable spike in cases, similar to other parts of the country. In early June, Hawaii’s streak of single-digit daily cases ended with three days of new infections in the teens.
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When higher caseloads inevitably appear, Green says he thinks the state will be ready to respond without the extreme shutdowns that were necessary in March. The department of health, for instance, now has on-call an additional 160 volunteer contact tracers for when the need arises. “We’ve beefed up our contact tracing and testing capacity by orders of magnitude,” he says. “And a lot of our understanding about the virus has matured. We’re stronger, and we can definitely manage it.”