Four years ago, the state Health Department’s Dr. Sarah Park was Hawaii’s super sleuth.

Honolulu was ravaged by a mysterious outbreak of hepatitis A. It was Park, state epidemiologist, who through public online surveys, traced the outbreak to scallops served at Genki Sushi.

“One thing popped out almost immediately: Patients who contracted hepatitis A had eaten at Genki Sushi way more often than the general public: 70 percent compared with just 25 percent,” Park said in a 2016 Honolulu magazine interview.

As recently as June of this year, Park was still “top doc.” Politico Magazine declared “How Hawaii Became a Rare COVID Success Story.”

“Park touted the role of contact tracers when advocating for $2.5 million in federal recovery funding to form a training partnership with the University of Hawaii,” the magazine wrote.

“Some states have abandoned contact tracing a long time ago. We could have done so as well, but we have chosen not to,” Park said.

It was a time when Park could do no wrong. The University of Hawaii was issuing press releases about her.

“This has been a brainchild of State Epidemiologist Dr. Sarah Park and UH’s own Dr. Aimee Grace, who leads our UHealthy Hawaii Initiative at the UH System,” said UH President Lassner.

“The plan is to then train approximately 300 contact tracers in two to three days, or two to three months, depending on their educational backgrounds,” Lassner said.

“With 300 staff to extend the capacity for monitoring and investigation, we expect to build the capacity up to at least 1,000 cases a day,” said Health Department Director Bruce Anderson.

A staff of 300! Imagine that.

But, as Bob Dylan cryptically warned: “There is no success like failure, And failure’s no success at all.”

If there was a plan, it either vaporized or didn’t work — because Park and Anderson have been scrounging around to come up with maybe 100 contact tracers and suddenly discovering that the office building where they have worked for years is old and overcrowded.

It is so jam-packed that when the contact tracing program was taken away from Park, it was moved to the Hawai‘i Convention Center.

Lt. Gov. Josh Green, also a doctor, prescribed hundreds of contact tracers and no more Sarah Park.

By Aug. 11, Green called for Park to be removed from management of the contact tracing program. Within days, the Health Department announced that Dr. Emily Roberson, a Hawaii Pacific University public health professor, would take over the state’s contact tracing program.

Green called for hiring 400 to 500 contact tracers, while adding that the state needs hundreds more.

One thing is certain: There is a lot COVID-19 virus to trace as Hawaii steadily reports triple-digit daily increases in cases. In fact it has soared to such an extent that some state officials are wondering if tracing will do anything.

“No amount of contact tracing will contain the spike that we’ve seen,” the Health Department’s Anderson said in a Civil Beat report.

“What’s going to stop this disease from spreading in Hawaii is not the number of contact tracers, it’s going to be our behavior,” he said.

With a Health Department that appears to switch plans almost daily with multiple priorities and no “see the big picture” sense of direction, putting the onus on the public instead of state leaders is as good a plan as any.

Richard Borreca writes on politics on Sundays. Reach him at 808onpolitics@gmail.com.