Let’s be clear here: This week’s additional measures for proof of COVID-19 vaccination or testing to enter dining or recreational establishments are meant to prevent a more-draconian, statewide lockdown. They are meant to keep as many of us as healthy as possible, while allowing workers to work, businesses to stay open and patrons to responsibly patronize their favorite places.
But it will take everyone coming together with patience and collective will if we have any chance of succeeding. The next few weeks will be a confounding yet critical make-or-break period: Success will see Hawaii beating back the scary surge in COVID-19 hospitalizations now straining the health-care system; failure will bring a surge beyond 500 COVID-19 hospitalizations, a breaking point that could well trigger rationing of health care for all, as well as strict lockdown except for essential activities. No one wants another crippling shutdown.
So come Monday, start dealing with new protocols — and expect confusion on several fronts.
Oahu launches its 60-day “Safe Access O‘ahu” program, which will require workers and patrons to show proof of COVID-19 vaccination to enter businesses such as restaurants, bars, gyms, theaters and museums; those unvaccinated will need to show a negative COVID-19 test result (see oneoahu.org/safe-access-oahu). Gathering-size limits still apply, of course.
Similar to Oahu’s “Safe Access,” Maui on Wednesday will launch its monthlong “Safer Outside” program, requiring proof of vaccination or negative test.
It will be a bumpy week, given still-swirling question about implementation. In an attempt to help businesses and customers with entry, the state just launched Hawaii’s SMART Health Card pass on Friday, allowing vaccination cards to be uploaded and shown digitally. If it works as hoped, the voluntary SMART pass should ease some burden for businesses and patrons, using a QR code on a smart-phone that aims to make clearance more efficient. But with merely a weekend given for businesses to upload a needed app to “read” the QR data and adapt, don’t expect this system to start smoothly.
Also looming: Stricter vaccine directives coming to many more workplaces.
Effective Monday, all government contractors and visitors entering state facilities must show proof of COVID-19 vaccination, or test negative at least weekly. This new policy announced just Thursday expands Gov. David Ige’s executive order last month requiring that by Aug. 16, all state and county workers get the COVID-19 vaccine or undergo weekly testing.
Clearly, the alarm over COVID-19 spread and severity is manifesting itself through swift, sweeping mandates. Unfortunately, follow-up guidance and implementation details have been far from clear.
That certainly is the case with President Joe Biden’s all-out effort to boost COVID-19 shots, announced Thursday, including new federal vaccine requirements on two major fronts:
>> Requiring vaccinations for employees of the executive branch and contractors doing business with the federal government, with no option to test out.
>> Directing private-sector businesses with 100 or more employees to require vaccination or mandatory weekly testing, under a new Occupational Safety and Health Administration rule.
It is an uncomfortable mandate: Though well-intended and correct in its goal of more immunizations for overall public health, its aggressiveness into the private sector raises concerns. The forceful push, expectedly, has already drawn criticisms of executive overreach by Republican governors and even labor union chiefs — but also praise from the American Medical Association, the National Association of Manufacturers and the Business Roundtable.
“Like many Americans, I am pro-vaccine and anti-mandate,” said Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel, in saying the party will push back in court.
Indeed, many companies already have self-instituted workplace vaccination policies, and that’s the ideal, since immunization is key to bringing the U.S. economy and health-care systems back from the brink. It shouldn’t take government mandates to get people to protect themselves and others against this deadly coronavirus.
But the important, bottom-line message? Vaccinations work. They worked against polio in the 1950s; against mumps, measles and rubella in the 1960s; against influenza, a common annual vaccination today. And they are proven to work against COVID-19, an insidious disease that’s easily transmissible.
A sobering, compelling study released Friday — which tracked 600,000-plus COVID-19 cases in 13 states from April through mid-July — found that unvaccinated people, compared to the vaccinated, were over 10 times more likely to be hospitalized and 11 times more likely to die, said the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The life-saving value of a COVID-19 vaccine should be self- evident. Let’s fervently hope this new flurry of public-health policies will result in many fewer coronavirus infections — and will provide that prod for the unvaccinated to better safeguard their own well- being and of those around them.
