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Any glimmer of hope that Hawaii’s leaders will control the coronavirus pandemic dims with the daily news.
Look at just one morning’s news last week:
>> The latest emergency order hatched by Gov. David Ige and Mayor Kirk Caldwell, called “Act Now Honolulu — No Social Gatherings,” only confused residents and businesses about the rationale and what they’re supposed to do.
>> A U.S. House health subcommittee accused Ige and his Health Department of spreading “conflicting and false information” on COVID-19 to the public and demanded accounting of $50 million in federal funds given Hawaii for contact tracing.
>> As Ige showed off his new contact tracing center, still 300 tracers short of what’s recommended for our population, Health Director Bruce Anderson repeated his discredited claim that contact tracing won’t work and blamed the public, not government confusion, for the worsening pandemic.
>> The state slow-walked COVID testing at Oahu Community Correctional Center, testing only 606 of 973 inmates between Aug. 11 and Aug. 19 despite 215 positive cases among inmates and 41 among staff.
>> Anderson described the 261 new Hawaii cases reported that day as “reasonably good news” because 56 of them were from the prison.
>> The Ige administration stalled funding and staffing for a panel of corrections experts asked by the Hawaii
Supreme Court to help solve overcrowding at OCCC in the pandemic.
>> A state House committee grew so frustrated with paltry COVID data given the public by the Ige administration on how and where the virus is spreading that it’s starting its own parallel system to gather and disseminate data.
>> Hawaii’s 257 public schools reopened without written guidelines from the Health Department, leading to scenarios such as one principal who said he had to make safety decisions from his gut and what he saw on TV.
>> The Department of Education sat on a three-month supply of personal protective equipment while school employees had to buy their own safety supplies and plead for public help.
>> Ryker Wada, state human resources director, told a state Senate panel that some state employees working from home aren’t actually working, but couldn’t explain the criteria for working at home and ducked responsibility for oversight.
Clearly, there will be no real glimmer of hope on COVID until David Ige is big enough to recognize he’s not big enough to handle this pandemic alone and asks for help.
His penchant for taking advice only from a small circle of political backers and lackluster subordinates, while freezing out contrary voices, is problematic in normal times and disastrous in a crisis.
Our community is full of diverse experts in health care, economics, technology, management and communications who could help turn this around. The governor just has to invite them in and use his emergency powers to clear out bureaucratic underbrush that gets in their way.
Reach David Shapiro at volcanicash@gmail.com.
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