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government would have an appropriate response (more testing, more contact tracing,
Tulsi Gabbard noted yesterday:
We need five times more contact tracers than the Department of Health has deployed. There is no excuse - DOH must employ hundreds more contact tracers to rapidly trace, investigate and contain every single COVID case.
With such an inadequate number of contact tracers, DOH couldn’t have an appropriate COVID response even if they wanted.
Bonus Round Question: Hawaii government has never held back from swelling an already bloated work force. Contact tracers would benefit taxpayers more than many other state workers in departments with smaller than usual workloads. What gives?
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@HOTPE: I don't want to hijack a valuable thread, but the answer to your question is that the state payroll can only be bloated with the "right people," and union rules don't allow idle state workers to be reassigned to jobs they don't like. Not enough of those people with the right connections have applied, and the underutilized workers prefer to remain idle . . . and get paid for it. The status quo must be preserved at all costs. No contract tracers for you!
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https://www.hawaii.edu/news/2020/07/21/u...t-tracers/
By the end of this week, the University of HawaiʻiHawaiʻi State Department of Health (UH-DOH) Contact Tracing Training Program will have trained nearly 450 qualified individuals who will be available to be activated by the DOH, as needed, to trace known contacts of COVID-19 positive cases throughout Hawaiʻi.
Track 1: Contact Tracing for Clinical Healthcare Professionals, a 1.5-day training course, trained a total of 393 individuals after its completion on July 17. Track 2: Community Contact Tracer Training, a six-week course available year-round for those with bachelor’s degrees without necessarily having a clinical health background, will graduate 49 individuals from its first cohort on July 24.
However, as noted above, they aren't
union contact tracers, preferably from a
local family.
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Track 1: Contact Tracing for Clinical Healthcare Professionals, a 1.5-day training course, trained a total of 393 individuals
Clinical Healthcare Professionals. Aren’t those the people who are already overworked, and dealing with increased caseloads during the pandemic?
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Why did DOH waste taxpayer money and people's time to train an army of contact tracers that they aren't going to use?
Perhaps the better question is: why am I even surprised, and exactly how much should I care?
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Chunkster,
"Speaking of which, why did Ige the Idiot wait until next Tuesday to resume the interisland quarantine?"
I don't know, but I would guess it gives time for people already on trips to return from Oahu before the quarantine restrictions kick in. I can't think of another reason. The governor also clarified the restrictions only apply to those flying from Oahu to other islands (not all of them, but most). This begs the question, what if you fly from Hilo to Lihue in Kauai for example? I don't believe there are any direct flights, so you have to transit through Honolulu. Does that mean you have to quarantine in Kauai or not?
Just curious. I'm not planning any trips in the near future.
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It won't be enforced, so the details don't really matter.
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Well, perhaps, but a lot of people are honest and obey the laws, plus legitimate businesses who send their employees on inter-island trips might want to know.
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From Hawaii News Now: "
It requires anyone arriving by air on any island except Oahu to quarantine for 14 days.
That means Neighbor Island travelers headed to Oahu will be exempt. But those hopping from one Neighbor Island to another will have to quarantine."
https://www.hawaiinewsnow.com/2020/08/06...ine-rules/
Sounds weird but the only way to avoid it would be to isolate those going neighbor island to neighbor island from those who have stopped in Oahu and that will never happen.
Certainty will be the death of us.
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Thanks, Kalianna, but I'm not sure things are still clear. Hopping to me means spending some time on each island, i.e., a few hours or days outside the airport and then moving onto another island. E.g., Flying from Hilo to Lihue is not island-hopping in my mind, you're forced to do that if that's the trip you need to make, but you're hardly staying in Oahu. However, you were in Oahu, albeit at the airport, so does that mean you have to quarantine? The article suggests you do which suggests HNL is not considered safe.
I completely agree that if that's the case then you need to isolate different inter-island travelers. How that's managed will be interesting to see, even if they attempt to do so. I suspect it will be beyond the state's ability to do so.
Then you have the flight crews that for Hawaiian are mostly based on Oahu. I assume they are exempt, but if they have to negotiate HNL and travel with all sorts of inter-island passengers. If HNL is considered unsafe then you have a vector for COVID-19 on every inter-island flight.
