On Politics: Who’s leading us, and how’s it going? Taking stock of Hawaii’s ordeal with COVID-19

The cliche about Martians landing on Earth, walking up to a tree and saying, “Take me to your leader,” might have some relevance as we plow into the second year of the COVID-19 crisis and Hawaii’s less-than-precise and organized attempts to deal with it.

Exactly who is leading us and how’s it going?

The person in the spotlight is Gov. David Ige, as the government person in charge of coping with the pandemic.

Just a year ago he was forced to pull the plug on the Hawaii economy by shutting down out of state tourism, essentially grounding local residents and ordering citizens to wear a mask in public in order to save us from passing the virus to one another.

One year ago, Ige was reacting to a statewide daily virus rate of 213.

As Hawaii’s leader, Ige’s actions may have been viewed as tough, but today we are facing statewide infection reports of more than 1,000 a day.

If you think Ige was administering the bitter medicine, consider the prescription offered by physician and Lt. Gov. Josh Green.

In an opinion piece in the Honolulu Star-Advertiser almost exactly a year ago, Green was unabashed in his criticism of the state and bristling with ways to remedy the problems.

“The leadership at the Department of Health failed to build effective COVID testing and contact tracing capacity to monitor and contain new outbreaks. These two failures have cost us enormously,” Green wrote then.

His call was for emergency staffing.

“We must increase hospital staffing statewide by at least 300 nurses and 100 beds for COVID this month, and prepare to launch our 150 emergency mobile hospital beds, staffing them with a mix of National Guard and private sector health-care professionals,” Green wrote.

The Big Island Democrat’s cries of “catastrophe” were not answered with nodding agreement by Ige, but a year later, the warnings remain alarming.

“I say we are two to four weeks at this rate from seeing major adjustments in what we’re able to do,” Green said last month.

“It’s a small minority (the unvaccinated) that is otherwise condemning society to a lockdown and potentially large-scale death,” Green added. “No one wants to close down businesses, no one wants to put in curfews, no one wants to curtail regular life or schools — but we have to keep people alive.”

If that is confusing on the macro level, the state Health Department is still bedeviled with problems from some on the support staff.

The state’s health director for Maui, Dr. Lorrin Pang, has been blasted by state Legislature’s House and Senate leaders and committee chairmen.They wrote to Ige last week asking him to remove Pang after the Honolulu Star- Advertiser reported that Pang is the co-founder of the Pono Coalition for Informed Consent.

The group on its website says that it “advocates for true informed consent before taking the experimental COVID-19 vaccines, before authorizing for another, or before administering,” but has been denounced by Ige, the state Department of Health and lawmakers for spreading misinformation about the vaccine, according to an Associated Press report.

Pang, in a news report, said his involvement with the Pono Coalition was as a private citizen and that he didn’t agree with all the views of its members.

All that, however, is more about Ige and Pang face- saving than what is needed, which is getting 100% of Hawaii’s eligible population vaccinated. Doing that would quiet state critics, give Drs. Pang and Green a day without saying “I protest,” and save scores of Hawaii residents from a life-threatening virus.

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