Editorial: Hope grows after a long, hard year

The past year has been one for the history books, even if it’s not yet clear how even this chapter will end.

But it’s already been a marathon, a race starting with the researchers in laboratories around the world, developing a vaccine in the hopes that they could beat the conventional time frame of a multiyear study and testing protocol.

What happened was nothing short of a miracle of science. Three vaccines already have emergency authorization in the U.S., and multiple examples of four vaccine types are in clinical trials worldwide. They, it is hoped, will pave the way out of the year-old coronavirus pandemic.

What makes it a race is that COVID-19 will continue to mutate into variants that are more transmissible, even more dangerous. And it’s the danger that has locked up economic activity, closing businesses and shedding jobs even at companies that are, for now, surviving.

Recovery seems more possible now, with vaccinations accelerating this week statewide. New approaches to government and business will be crucial, however, to capitalize on lessons learned and inoculate Hawaii for economic health, too.

Owing to its dependence on a visitor industry, the pain was immediate and acute. On March 5, 2020, Gov. David Ige declared a state of emergency, a day before announcing the state’s first COVID-19 case; on March 26, he mandated a 14-day quarantine for all arriving travelers. In October the state launched its Safe Travels testing program to partially reopen tourism, but the losses of those early months had turned Waikiki into a ghost town.

Retail and food-service companies were hit hard. Between March 1 and July 10, 2020, 95 restaurants and 91 retail businesses had shut their doors for good. A survey by the University of Hawaii Economic Research Organization taken soon after the shutdown started indicated that 40% of businesses indicated an inability to continue operating until tourism reopened.

And that was with the first dose of fiscal relief that Congress delivered, with uncharacteristic speed, in what was dubbed the CARES Act. Money went to state and local governments, including “plus-up” supplements to unemployment insurance (UI).

Individuals received stimulus checks and companies could apply for forgivable loans by retaining employees in what was called the Paycheck Protection Program. In Honolulu, the county also issued its own small grants to help businesses cover adaptation costs.

Additional waves of aid followed — another one, with a pricetag at around $1.9 trillion, is expected to emerge from Capitol Hill soon. Collectively, so far, they were not enough to save everyone.

Further, the learning curve for administering all this locally was steep. The Ige administration, in particular, wrestled with new mandates for duties such as contact tracing as COVID-19 cases multiplied.

Basic bureaucratic inertia was a factor, but so was the state’s antiquated information technology systems. Schools scrambled to enable distance learning for children, which has proved to be enormously stressful and less than effective.

The UI system caused the worst headache: Even for those accessing the conventional system, the crush of claims barred the virtual door. And the mandate to create a wholly new program for “gig” workers and the self-employed proved taxing for the state Department of Labor and Industrial Relations.

Efforts to sort through the mess left thousands waiting for payments, even today. It was enough to spark a march to the state Capitol and to DLIR offices’ actual doors, which are still barred while the agency contends with the backlog.

The consequences of this many people being thrust into poverty is straining a social safety net already in need of repairs.

Meanwhile, the public-health yield has been relatively low case counts. The nation’s political polarization deepened in a presidential election year, with battle lines drawn over issues of masking and social distancing. But in Hawaii, those divides were largely absent: People accepted the recommended safety protocols fairly readily.

Eager to declare victory, however, residents let down their guard in mid-summer gatherings, and a second surge of disease started to pack the hospitals again.

Up to that point Hawaii had watched from afar the grisly mainland death toll, but when 27 people died at Yukio Okutsu State Veterans Home in Hilo — and clusters emerged in prisons and public housing — the picture became grim here as well.

Restrictions tightened again, and it wasn’t until well after the holidays that the virus seemed under better control.

Economic forecasts look a bit brighter now and hope has lightened the gloom of the past terrible year. Technologies that at least enabled virtual gatherings and services have helped families cope; some businesses have survived by reinventing themselves.

Such advances can be celebrated, but the course to full recovery will be long and require more of that inventiveness and a willingness to change how things are done. When the COVID-19 marathon ends, the rest of the race — a triathlon, in fact — will await.