LIHU‘E —The Kaua‘i District Health Office reported five new cases of COVID-19 on Saturday, one adult resident and four adult visitors.
LIHU‘E —The Kaua‘i District Health Office reported five new cases of COVID-19 on Saturday, one adult resident and four adult visitors.
All of the cases are travel-related. One of the travelers had taken a pre-travel test but did not receive the positive test report until after arriving on Kaua‘i. Close contacts are being identified, directed to quarantine and offered testing.
The island now has 19 confirmed active cases, all in isolation. One case remains in the hospital, while the other previously hospitalized case has been discharged. There are now 90 individuals in health department-directed quarantine. The number of close contacts in quarantine may increase as the investigation continues.
Kaua‘i now has a cumulative case count of 109, of which 96 are confirmed locally, one is a probable case, and 12 are positive cases that were diagnosed elsewhere—with tests taken on the mainland whose positive results did not arrive until they were on Kaua‘i.
For more information on the state’s COVID-19 cases or the state’s Safe Travels program, visit hawaiicovid19.com.
For more information on the county’s voluntary post-travel testing program, visit kauai.gov/COVID-19. For more information on the county’s surge testing program, visit kauai.gov/test.
How far do we have to go with this idiocy before we see that our testing program is no more effective than other islands (ie Tahiti) whose programs failed miserably.
If we stopped travel completely now, and reinstituted a lockdown, we would still see our case numbers increase for 2 weeks. It will take 4 to 6 weeks for numbers to then fall back to where they are today. Do we really need to increase our burden of cases and community spread of disease further?
How many more people do we need to entice to leave areas of high infection with a “negative test” just to arrive here with COVID? Large parts of the country are in various phases of restriction but we are letting them come here with no restrictions. This seems imprudent.
New Zealand health officials have just documented a single presymptomatic COVID infected traveler infected 4 other passengers on a long flight with rigorous mask and glove requirements in place. In New Zealand all of these cases were caught by a 14 day quarantine preventing infections from entering the community. We aren’t even pretending to do that. Each person that shows up here either with a positive diagnosis either on arrival (suprise!) or diagnosed later has already had the opportunity to spread the disease further during the long transoceanic flights, before even interacting with the community.
In the last month we have had almost as many (45 vs 59) cases on Kauai as we had in the first 7.5 months of the pandemic. We don’t need to wait 2 weeks to figure out where that “rolling average” is going.
Opt out of the pretesting. If Governor Ige is committed to making his legacy the decimation of Hawaii by COVID, we cant control that. But our Mayor and Council do have the ability to protect this the island. Exercise that ability. I suspect that in short order the governor will approve a 7 day two test system which would drastically reduce but not eliminate infections from being introduced to the island. In the meantime we will be all the safer with the two week quarantine.
This+++