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Many who received assistance to return home didn’t plan to honor Hawaii quarantine, nonprofit says

GEORGE F. LEE / GLEE@STARADVERTISER.COM
                                The intersection at Kalakaua Avenue and Lewers Street in Waikiki is seen devoid of people Saturday as restaurants and non-essential businesses slowly reopened on Oahu.

GEORGE F. LEE / GLEE@STARADVERTISER.COM

The intersection at Kalakaua Avenue and Lewers Street in Waikiki is seen devoid of people Saturday as restaurants and non-essential businesses slowly reopened on Oahu.

Hawaii still has a mandatory 14-day self-quarantine for passengers, but that didn’t stop another 529 visitors from coming into the state on Monday.

The Hawaii Tourism Authority reported today that 1,732 passengers arrived in Hawaii on Monday. The passengers, who came on 20 flights, also included 493 residents and 100 people who planned to relocate to Hawaii. Additionally, there were 180 airline crew members and 119 transit passengers who did not plan to leave the airport. There were 192 military members. Also arriving were 119 people who were exempt from the quarantine.

RELATED: First Hawaii resident charged with violating state traveler quarantine

Visitors made up approximately 30% of the total arrivals on Monday. Most of the visitors, some 471, went to Oahu. There were 52 visitors that went to Maui, five to Lihue and two to Kona.

Some 80% of the Oahu visitors, who filled out the state Department of Transportation’s travel declaration form, said the purpose of their trip was to visit friends and family. Another 8% said they were coming for business, 2% to relocate to Hawaii and nearly 11% for vacation. The answers don’t add up to 100% because visitors can chose more than one answer and 13 respondents left the question blank.

Monday’s visitors were the third highest count since the quarantine order for trans-Pacific flights began on March 26. On Sunday, 667 visitors came, and 546 arrived on Thursday.

Visitor counts have waxed and waned since a quarantine began. However, they’ve been above 400 every day since June 1 when Gov. David Ige announced that an interisland passenger quarantine, which began April 1, would end on June 16.

Ige is expected to extend the trans-Pacific quarantine order, which effectively collapsed Hawaii tourism, beyond June 30 sometime this week.

Hawaii’s low COVID-19 infection and death rate prompted Ige to relax the interisland quarantine. However, deciding when to lift the trans-Pacific quarantine is a more complex decision since many of the early cases of COVID-19 in Hawaii were brought here by visitors and returning residents.

Some fear easing traveler restrictions in Hawaii could potentially cause a second wave of infections. Before the COVID-19 pandemic and restrictions, some 30,000 passengers a day, most of them visitors, were arriving in Hawaii.

Visitor counts aren’t expected to approach normalcy for some time. Indeed, only 3.5 million visitors are expected to come here by year’s end as compared to a record 10.4 million last year.

Opinions, even from the highest government levels, vary on whether new safety protocols and proper hygiene practices are enough to reopen Hawaii tourism safely or whether some combination of testing, contact tracing, thermal screening and tourism lockdowns must be included.

In the meantime, state and county government and tourism officials are relying on the quarantines to keep Hawaii safe and are working to close quarantine loopholes.

From April 6 to today, the Visitor Aloha Society of Hawaii has assisted 81 travelers, who don’t have a place to complete their quarantine, return home through the HTA funded COVID-19 Flight Assistance Program.

Jessica Lani Rich, VASH president and CEO, said most of the visitors that are referred to her knew about the quarantine but didn’t plan to honor it.

“Why would anymore want to come to Hawaii when there’s a quarantine?” Rich said. “We’re hearing from some that they didn’t want to change their plans or that they couldn’t get their money back. Others clearly felt that they could get around the quarantine.”

Rich said a family recently asked for help getting home after they learned that their hotel would only issue them a key for one-time use during the quarantine.

“It finally sunk in that this wasn’t the right time to visit Hawaii,” she said. “They had a return ticket so we didn’t have to pay for their flight we just helped them book a new one quickly. They were only here for an hour so we told them that they could go home and we would call ahead to let authorities know it was OK.”

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