Coronavirus: Hawaii

Above is a video I noticed showing panic buying in Hawaii. As of now, there are no reported cases of the coronavirus in Hawaii, but that is perhaps due to the inability to test anyone.

Hawaii News Now reported February 20th:

The botched coronavirus test kits that were sent to Hawaii now have to be re-manufactured. U.S. Sen. Brian Schatz says he’s been told by CDC that the new test kits won’t be ready until mid-March. “The fact that it’s going to take a month for them to re-manufacture totally unacceptable,” he said.

That date has shifted a couple weeks. Hawaii Public Radio reported on February 28th:

A Northern California health worker who had cared for a patient with coronavirus hopped a plane to visit Hawaii, arriving yesterday. Today, after alerted by federal officials, state health officials tested the woman and found she does not have coronavirus.

The case represents the first time Hawaii officials have discussed results of local testing for the rapidly spreading COVID-19 virus. Health officials were able to use components of kits sent earlier this month from U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to carry out the tests on the visitor, although some kit parts were deemed defective. 



So the CDC sent kits that can still detect the virus, but were defective in other areas. America was given a couple weeks of advance notice via the extreme (overly aggressive) Chinese efforts to control the virus as well as the airline restrictions that were put into place. This advance warning was potentially tossed out the window due to government bureaucracy.

Also, who is this health worker who put people at risk on the plane, at the hotel and any other place she visited?

KHON2 (February 25th) looked into the potential of how the failure of the CDC to properly take advantage of the time they were given could have dire consequences for Hawaii:

Hawaii doctors have alerted the Department of Health at least 8 times about patients they thought could have coronavirus, but none of them were tested. Always Investigating explains why. The state tells KHON2 the eight patients flagged by doctors did not meet the definition requiring testing. Hawaii is among just a handful of U.S. states and territories that have not submitted samples to the CDC.

Let's just emphasize a sentence again: "The state tells KHON2 the eight patients flagged by doctors did not meet the definition requiring testing." Does that sound really similar to what the doctors at UC Davis were told? If you aren't aware, UC Davis recently announced that they had a patient that tested positive for coronavirus. They were initially told their patient did not meet testing requirements. A test was eventually done and it was announced on Wednesday, February 26th, that the patient indeed had the virus.

If the virus is in Hawaii, how would it have gotten there? The New York Times looks into one potential reason: tourists.

More than nine million people visit Hawaii each year, one in three of whom are international tourists. Health officials said that there was little chance that the infection had spread, but that they would continue to search for anyone who had prolonged contact with the couple. There had been no confirmed cases of coronavirus in the state before the two tourists were diagnosed in Japan.
Janice Okubo, a spokeswoman for the Hawaii Department of Health, said that the man who was confirmed with the virus “is not believed to have had any prolonged, close contact with Hawaii residents,” but that health officials were continuing to investigate.

. . . Dr. Sarah Park, the state epidemiologist, said the man had most likely been exposed to the virus before leaving Japan or while traveling to Hawaii. He and his wife, who was also confirmed on Saturday with the virus but did not show symptoms while in Hawaii, arrived on Maui on Jan. 28. The man was also symptom-free in Maui, but after the couple moved to Honolulu, on Oahu, on Feb. 3, he began showing signs of a cold.

. . . The man who became ill wore a mask when he was outside and while on the flight back to Japan, officials said, and was diagnosed with pneumonia, and later with coronavirus, after returning to the couple’s home in Nagoya, Japan’s fourth-largest city.

So . . . how many potential Chinese and Japanese tourists came to Hawaii and had the virus, but weren't all that ill? We're being told that around 80% of individuals don't really come down with anything significant. We'll have to wait and see, but this virus surely seems like a high risk situation for the islands.