Month: August 2020

At some point, this will happen again. There will be another new virus and another pandemic. And while every pandemic is different, there are some universal, concrete things we can do to try to weather that storm better than we've weathered this one. The big picture: Here are nine things the U.S. should do in the next pandemic — some big, some small, some lessons from what went wrong this time, some lessons from what‘s gone right. 1. Move fast This is one of the biggest, sharpest dividing lines between the countries that handled the coronavirus well and the ones that handled it poorly. If you don’t kick into gear until it’s a crisis, you’re only going to ensure a much bigger and longer-lasting crisis. 2. Diversify the preparation The global public health community had been preparing for a...

Just five days into a federally funded COVID-19 surge testing program on Oahu, about 1,000 people from the Kaneohe testing site have been told they have to retake the test due to a mislabeling error. Mayor Kirk Caldwell, Gov. David Ige and U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams announced Tuesday that 5,000 free tests a day — up to 60,000 over the next two weeks — would be offered to Oahu residents. The idea behind the federally funded surge testing program is to help officials in high-risk communities identify where the virus is so they can take steps to bring down positivity rates and ease hospitalizations. City spokesman Alexander Zannes told the Star-Advertiser today that the Honolulu Fire Department did not receive proper guidance from eTrueNorth, which led to test tubes at the Kaneo...

In an email Sunday evening, a Health and Human Services official said, “At one of the sites, the non-eTrueNorth staff who were responsible for putting patient identifiers on the vials, did not do so for approximately 1,000 vials and the vials arrived at the lab with no patient identifiers on the vials.”

Hawaii island has had its first two coronavirus-related deaths following an outbreak at the Yukio Okutsu State Veterans Home. The home reported the deaths of the patients, who had underlying health conditions, today, according to Elena Cabatu, director of public affairs for the Hilo Medical Center, which owns the building where Avalon Health Care operates the home. Cabatu said one of the patients died Saturday and the other died Sunday. No more information on the deaths was immediately available, she said. The latest fatalities raise the statewide coronavirus-related death toll to 65. Hawaii island has seen a surge in cases over the last week and it’s total number of cases surpassed Maui County’s total for the first time today. Health officials today reported 174 new COVID-19 ca...