It’s time to require travelers to Hawaii to have a coronavirus booster shot or to be subject to pretravel testing or quarantine upon arrival, according to Lt. Gov. Josh Green.
“Just keep it simple, please — boosted or tested,” Green — a Kohala Hospital emergency room physician and the architect of Hawaii’s Safe Travels program — said Monday in an online interview.
Currently, the program requires either two shots of Pfizer or Moderna vaccine or a single shot of Johnson &Johnson vaccine for travelers to forego tests or quarantine. Gov. David Ige last week hinted the change is coming, but said it would take at least two weeks to codify the changes and properly notify travelers.
“It’s got to be straightforward and simple, otherwise it will create chaos,” Green said. “… You’ll still be able to get a test if you want to come in through Safe Travels, because we’re not going to discriminate against people and not let them travel if they happen, for whatever personal reason they may have, to simply not get vaccinated.”
Green said Ige would like to see the changes by Feb. 1 but called Feb. 15 “probably more realistic.” According to Green, Safe Travels kept Hawaii “as a travel hub, a tourist destination, alive.”
“And we were able to keep our counts as the lowest in the country,” he added. “Believe it or not, even though there’s a lot of cases right now, we have the lowest positivity rate in the country.”
As of Friday, Hawaii ranked 12th nationally in test positivity in the U.S., according to Johns Hopkins University, with a 20.1% positivity rate.
On Saturday, the state Department of Health said it would temporarily “suspend the processing of negative cases” in its COVID data bank.
“As testing data flows through the electronic reporting system, the system is stressed,” said Health Director Dr. Elizabeth Char. Without the inputting of negative test data, DOH can’t calculate or report positivity rates.
Green said the pandemic has “chewed up and spit out a whole lot of public health workers.”
“They’re doing their best at this point, because they are truly overwhelmed at the crisis that’s gone on for two years. I hope they’ll be able to bring on more people, because we need those numbers,” Green said. “The most important numbers right now, however, are the number of people that are in the hospital and the number of people that are in the intensive care unit — because that is the number that will ultimately determine what our policy decisions have to be.”
Green said that as of Monday, there were 356 COVID-19 patients hospitalized statewide, with 39 of them in intensive care units. In Hawaii County, there were 42 hospitalized COVID patients.
“We peaked at 448 on Sept. 3, if you recall, so these are two very different parts of the pandemic,” he said. “The part with delta when we had 448 out of 11,500 (active cases), told us that four out of every 100 people ended up in the hospital and were quite sick. Now with omicron, we have an incredible number of cases. Today, our active case count is 50,944. Yet a much smaller number, 356 people — which is 0.7% — ended up in the hospital. … That means that the delta variant was five times more likely to put a person into a severe illness state and into the hospital (than omicron). And we do have a smaller number of people in the ICU, thank goodness, 39. It was twice has high before.”
According to Green, the 39 infected patients in the state’s ICUs “all have omicron, and they are all suffering very severe disease.”
“The sickest individuals have tended to be those who were not vaccinated at all or incompletely immune,” he said. “Of the individuals who were in the hospital today, of the 356, 143 individuals did have two shots. That’s 40%. So you’re not totally protected if its been several months after your second shot. But individuals who have gotten a booster do not see the inside of an intensive care unit.
“We’ve got 430,000 people who have received boosters. Those 430,000 people are the least likely to get severely ill.”
Green said about a half-million other individuals are eligible to receive their booster shot and urged them to do so.
According to Green, 350 health care personnel — mostly nurses but some respiratory therapists — have arrived for temporary assignment in Hawaii, and another 250 are slated to arrive next week. The price tag of $90 million is being paid for by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
“As we spell the health care workers that caught COVID or had to go into quarantine … we have this extra help — to not just care for patients but also to help, hopefully, with more testing and more vaccinations. The boosters are key,” he said.
Green said omicron data from elsewhere indicates Hawaii’s case rates are starting to plateau and will soon start to decline.
“When we get back down to reasonable numbers, a couple hundred cases a day, and we have a total number of active cases closer to 2,000, because of the hospitalization rate being as low as it is, it will not register as a health crisis any longer,” he said.
“That’s when people will be reflecting on it as endemic and something that we live with.”
Email John Burnett at jburnett@hawaiitribune-herald.com.