Thousands of travelers poured into Hawaii every day in January and February. But a coronavirus catastrophe never came.
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.
Josh Green, Hawaii’s lieutenant governor and a practicing ER doctor , grew worried in mid-February, when he learned that a man from Japan had spent nine days in Hawaii and then tested positive for coronavirus. With 25,000 travelers pouring into the state every day during January and February, 30 percent of them from Asia, Hawaii seemed a fertile ground for a major outbreak.
With arguments still flaring up across the country about the most effective way to manage the coronavirus response—often divided between those who want a heavy government hand and those who don’t—Hawaii’s experience shows that sometimes what works best is a multipronged, even redundant approach. “We realized that, unlike residents, travelers stick mostly to themselves,” Park says. “They’re not going to our potlucks or our beach barbecues or hanging out in someone’s garage, where they’re in close contact with other people for a sustained period of time.”Hawaii got its first case—a resident returning to Honolulu on the Grand Princess cruise ship. Park’s team scrambled to figure out who in the state the individual had spent more than 10 minutes in close contact with.
Plenty of other states had similar government tracking programs. The difference is that Hawaii was able to keep its going as the virus spread, thanks to some combination of stamina at the department of health and the fact that the state’s high-water mark for daily cases never went above 34, on April 3. “States were doing intensive case investigation and contact tracing in the beginning.
wanted to do was go by the CDC playbook, which normally is a good one, but not in this crisis,” says Green, When his first patient with Covid-like symptoms showed up in late February, his staff at Premier Medical Group was prepared. As Miscovich tells it, the patient was HIV-positive, with a fever of 101.8, very low oxygen levels, lung sounds consistent with pneumonia and chest heaviness. And he worked for the Transportation Security Administration at the Honolulu airport.
After that, Miscovich and his staff, including two of his adult children, traveled to Maui and the Big Island, then back to Oahu. Working directly with the mayors, they pitched their tents anywhere that could accommodate large numbers of cars—public parks, community centers, boat harbors and the huge soccer complex where, in gentler times, my son played games every weekend.
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