Hawaii lawmakers push for tightened quarantine as visitor numbers climb

The number of visitors arriving in Hawaii increased Friday to the largest count since the state’s 14-day quarantine began in late March as Hawaii lawmakers strive to improve the passenger quarantine before tourism reopens.

On Friday, 223 visitors flew to the islands, the most since the quarantine began March 26, when 268 visitors arrived in Hawaii, according to the Hawaii Tourism Authority.

The lowest number of arriving tourists during the quarantine, 83, was on April 23, and the number has slowly been increasing since.

Honolulu City Council member Kym Pine said the increase in visitors was concerning because the state lacks a strong program for tracking tourists and tracing contacts of people who test positive. In addition, she said tourists need to be tested before they board a plane or be tested after arriving with a test that has a quick turnaround.

“We are facing a second wave (of the coronavirus) caused by high-risk tourists that don’t care whether they get contracted or not,” she said. “They’re coming here for fun on the cheap. That’s not the kind of tourists we want here.”

She said tourists should be tracked by their cellphones despite privacy concerns because they chose to come here and they agreed to follow the state’s quarantine.

“They’re coming because word spread that we can’t track them,” she said. “Here we are having an international pandemic, and they’re still getting on a plane to go have fun somewhere.”

She said it was terrifying considering the possibility of another surge after businesses and residents have worked so hard to keep the infection rate low.

“We are in trouble right now,” she said. “We can’t track them. We aren’t testing them.”

On Friday, state Department of Land and Natural Resources officers cited a 22-year-old tourist for hiking the closed Sacred Falls park in Windward Oahu.

The woman, who was hiking with a 23-year-old Army man stationed at Schofield Barracks, was cited for ignoring the state’s emergency orders during the pandemic. The man was cited for being in a closed area, DLNR said. The park has been closed since a rockfall killed eight people on Mother’s Day in 1999.

“It appears that some of the tourists who are coming to Hawaii and violate the mandatory 14-day traveler self-quarantine rules think they can sneak undetected into Sacred Falls because no one is watching,” Division of Conservation and Resources Enforcement Chief Jason Redulla said in a DLNR Facebook post. “People have to realize that this is not the place to go, COVID-19 crisis, or not.”

On Saturday, Hawaii reported one new coronavirus case, bringing total cases to 620. So far, 541 patients have recovered since the start of the outbreak, 72 have required hospitalizations and 16 have died.

Closing loopholes

Hawaii’s coronavirus infection rate is among the lowest in the U.S. The Senate Special COVID-19 Committee wants to keep it that way.

They don’t want Hawaii tourism to start ramping up without a mandatory 14-day self-quarantine for passengers — and they want to see the loopholes closed that have allowed for some leakage.

Passengers have fallen from about 30,000 a day at this time last year, but Sen. Donovan Dela Cruz said the committee is concerned about daily visitor arrivals starting to tick up a bit.

Dela Cruz said the committee spent more than three hours at Daniel K. Inouye International Airport on Friday reviewing the screening process. They’ve asked the state Department of Transportation and the HTA to provide them with a report Tuesday on how to fix loopholes and how to scale the process to accommodate more visitors. It’s their understanding that the state Department of Health supports extending passenger quarantines even after the rest of the state begins to open.

Based on what they saw at the airport, Dela Cruz said the committee plans to ask Gov. David Ige to issue an emergency proclamation requiring visitors to fill out the backside of the agricultural form, which provides information about the category of lodging where they are staying and their length of stay. Instead of one form per family, the committee wants every arriving passenger to fill it out.

Sen. Sharon Moriwaki said the agricultural form is an important tool in identifying and monitoring visitors who are staying at vacation rentals, which are currently considered non-essential businesses. Moriwaki said she’d also like to see quarantining passengers required to be shuttled to their accommodations — a move that would reduce the risk of COVID-19 transmission and identify those who are staying at illegal vacation rentals.

Tighter restrictions

The committee also is waiting for state Attorney General Clare Connors to tell them if it’s possible for the state to require quarantining passengers to stay at guarded quarantine sites and or submit to enhanced monitoring that could include ankle bracelets, GPS tracking and Facebook recognition.

“You can see the curve has been relatively flat with the reduced amount of travel,” Dela Cruz said. “If you don’t put some of these measures in place to prevent infection, then once there’s a (travel) resurgence we are going to be back to where we are. We don’t want to have to be closing everything to the point that we are now.”

However, not everyone believes travel bans work.

Vin Gupta, affiliate assistant professor of health metrics sciences at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, expressed skepticism Thursday during a Council on Foreign Relations press call.

“The countries that didn’t preemptively stop flights coming in from China had less per capita rates of infection during COVID than the countries like us that at some point decided we wern’t accepting any more flights,” Gupta said. “Bans just don’t work. Diseases of pandemic potential find a way, especially respiratory diseases.”

Gupta opined that travel bans aren’t practical either, given that leakage has occurred. More than 40,000 Americans and Chinese citizens have traversed the Pacific Ocean between China and the U.S. since the administration put the travel ban in place in February.

He also worries that bans promote lack of collaboration and data transparency.

“I can understand why people think Hawaii can ban its way out of new cases. I think COVID obviously has made its way to everywhere … and it’s better to index on collaboration and the joint effort and full transparency than it is to do otherwise,” Gupta said.

Peter Tarlow, president of Tourism and More, and world-renown tourism safety and security expert, who helped Aruba’s visitor industry recover after the 2005 disappearance of American teen Natalee Holloway, isn’t a fan of quarantines either.

“You can’t put me in prison for coming to Hawaii to spend money. Hawaii is better off not reopening until it’s ready. You don’t want to give up your aloha spirit — without that you’re just another place with a beach,” Tarlow said.

At this juncture, Tarlow says the focus should be on how to reopen safely without a quarantine. While tourism isn’t going to be what it once was, reopening under a new safety-focused paradigm might replace some lost visitor industry jobs by creating demand for architects and construction experts to create social distancing and for sanitation and medical expertise and oversight.

Sean Dee, executive vice president and chief marketing officer for Outrigger Hospitality Group, said the company has had to suspend operations at many of its properties.

“We are in active discussions with the airlines, HTA, Hawaii Lodging & Tourism Association and other tourism stakeholders while we continue to follow the governor’s guidance and discourage visitors from coming to Hawaii during the quarantine,” Dee said. “Obviously, as long as the quarantine is in effect we will not be able to re-open our properties.”

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