Lee Cataluna: Community taking over quarantine enforcement

It is very hard to get busted for flying into Hawaii and breaking the mandatory 14-day quarantine for inbound travelers.

There are hundreds of tourists arriving every day and hundreds of tourists out and about surfing, sunning and hiking with impunity, and only one or two with their names in the news for getting in trouble.

But the few who have been arrested for breaking quarantine all seem to have one thing in common: They were really asking for it.

They were trying so hard to get noticed, it’s as though they were auditioning for a reality show.

They were posting pictures of themselves with captions like, “Hawaii — no passport needed!” and laying out their vacation schedule day by day so everyone and anyone could see that they got off the plane and went straight out into public. They posed. They blogged. They hash­tagged. They created all the evidence against themselves. Some got more flagrant over time, inviting everyone on social media to follow their great adventure.

And thankfully, people did. Hawaii people. Concerned citizens. People who are, in a word, makaala.

It is important to remember when we look back at this time that it was the citizens of Hawaii who did much of the detective work here, monitoring vacation photos on social media, checking the Geo-tags, tracking these scofflaws’ movements and calling law enforcement.

With so many people sitting at home trying to amuse themselves, online investigative work of identifying and tracking quarantine breakers has become a sport in Hawaii, with Facebook groups and hashtags and a gallery of outraged commenters. Thank goodness for those people who took it upon themselves to be watchful on behalf of the community without turning into vigilantes. Thank goodness for the bright line between righteous anger and vengeance and for everybody who has stayed on the good side of that.

It’s also important to note that for every loser who has been arrested for breaking the quarantine put in place to keep COVID-19 from being reintroduced to Hawaii, there are untold numbers of rule breakers who have been photographed by citizens, called out on social media and reported to authorities with no resulting enforcement. The outlaws have to be outlandish, the outcry has to be fierce.

A recent quarantine breaker was finally arrested at the airport as he was leaving, which doesn’t accomplish much beyond making the point that citizens were tracking him until they successfully lobbied for an arrest. But he was going home anyway. If he was infectious, his personal damage already would be done. Enforcement needs to be on the front end. The watchdogs of the community need to go back to their real jobs. But in the meantime, tourists with every intention of not letting a little thing like mandatory quarantine get in the way of their tropical escape should know that the people of Hawaii are watching. They’re working together. They’re pretty serious about protecting the islands from another round of illness.

Reach Lee Cataluna at 529-4315 or lcataluna@staradvertiser.com.