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Kauai Gets Thrown Under the Bus
Oct. 16th, 2020 01:08 pmThe last week, I've been enjoying Kauai with some self-awareness. (Much like I did with California in 2019.) Last Tuesday when I swam at the mostly empty Poipu, I was aware that it wasn't just quiet swimming that was quickly coming to an end, but safe swimming too.
And yesterday Kimberly and I felt much the same when we made some plans to eat out. Which didn't turn out exactly as planned.
The problem is our politicians. For six months, Kauai has been one of the safest counties in the United States of Disease-ridden America. Maui too. Not so much Oahu, where as we saw they don't care the least bit about public health. But on Kauai we've had 59 cases ever. Like I said: safest place.
It's been because of the 14-day quarantine that went up in April. And now, despite the fact that Autumn surge has begun, our idiot politicians have decided to end it.
They're hiding behind a new pre-testing program where someone has to get a negative test no more than three days before they come to the island to avoid the quarantine. But, the program is riddled with problems, as the government's own scientists have told them. They've estimated that 20-30% of COVID-19 will still get through. And, it's no surprise. You add together people testing negative because they're still incubating, people getting COVID after their test, and people getting it on the plane, and I'll be shocked if it's not higher.
So, in one of the two states with a strong natural barrier to entry, we're pissing that away and welcoming COVID in.
Our mayor had an answer: a 3-day quarantine and a required post-arrival test. That would have resolved 99% of the problem and kept Kauai pretty safe. But the governor vetoed it, and our mayor folded like a house of cards.
The problem, one of the problems, is that Kauai's Mayor Kawakami is very inexperienced. As in, he's a surfer-dude that's younger than I am. So, the Big Island mayor, Kim, was fighting for post-arrival testing too, but when he didn't get it, he said, "We're opting out of the pre-arrival program" and within a day he had at least a half-assed version of the post-arrival testing, and then he said, "Oh, there was a mistake in thinking I was opting out." But our mayor's answer was to have the county council send a plea to please let us do our post-arrival testing. And to say: we didn't promise anyone we'd open up on October 15th, only you did. Which is true, but of course that didn't work. Because our mayor was too green to understand that he needed leverage, which is what Mayor Kim on the Big Island created when he opted out.
Our mayor's answer following that particular failure?
A horrible "tiers" program, which is riddled with problems.
First, it punishes the locals by limiting their gathering as tourists bring COVID here. That's Tier 3. And only once COVID has hit a catastrophic rate, where every two weeks we have as many cases of COVID as we had in the last seven months, and only after he's starting locking down local gatherings, only then does he opt out of the failed pre-testing program. That's Tier 2.
Kauai, by the by, has 9 ICU beds. *NINE*. According to the stats, 14%-20% of COVID patients end up hospitalized, and 3-5% end up in the ICU. Assuming the absolute best case, we end up in Tier 2 after a week of 35 cases and have 3% entry to the ICU. That's 11% of our ICU beds gone immediately, and we've got COVID raging through the community. Worst case is 56 cases in the week that things get closed down, and it's likely we've been building up cases for a few weeks to hit that number. So call it 75 cases. At a 5% entry rate to the ICU that's 44% of our ICU beds gone just that week, and by the next week we've probably got people dying in the hospital corridors.
The real issue here is that our Mayor, Kawakami, doesn't think things through, and he especially doesn't math.
So he came up with a retail restriction which would have let so few people into grocery stores and Costco that there would have been starvation on the island. (Someone remathed it for him the next day.)
And he locked up the golf courses _after_ disease had already stopped spreading on the island, and without any consideration to the fact that golf courses obviously weren't a super-spreader locale.
And he ran curfews at night as if the disease could only spread then.
And he told us that he was going to lock the island down for 28 days every time there was a single case of community spread.
So it's not even like he's totally in the tourist industry's pocket; he seemed to be totally protecting the local community back in spring.
It's just that he simultaneously feels he has to do something, swings wildly back and forth, and is incompetent in about 50% of his decisions, in large part because he doesn't math.
So now, the safest county in the United States is opening up in an unsafe way, exposing a population which literally has 0% immunity (to two significant digits, unless you presume infection is 10x what has been reported, then it's only to one), just as COVID is exploding across the United States in the long-promised autumnal bloom.
(And did I mention that only people from the US are eligible for the pre-arrival testing? 'Tis true. And the stats say that they're the most likely to spread COVID of almost anyone in the world.)
So that's why Kimberly and I were doing a final eating out yesterday, because we figured there couldn't be too many tourists on the island after day one.
Though we saw a pair at Costco. Gawking about, wearing expensive, tight clothes, the guy wearing a lei.
But we went to Keoki's last night, because they had a touchless buffet, and it sounded good.
Except that it turned out that their touchless buffet involved standing in line with all the other touchless buffet people. With no social distancing going on. We had reservations, we wanted to support one of our favorite local residents, but upon seeing all of that, we got up from our table, told the hostess we were bailing, and left.
We ate at an outdoor table at Savage Shrimp in the nearby Shops at Kukui'ula. And got ice cream at Lappert's. It was actually quite nice if not as fancy, in no small part because that tourist-heavy shopping center was still almost empty.
Yes, this is all being done for the economy. Yes, I have sympathy for the people now missing their paycheck, themselves thrown under the bus by the sociopathic Republicans in Washington, who have actually admitted that they are preemptively trying to cripple the Biden administration by destroying the economy.
But choosing the absolutely worst time to open up the island, when COVID spread is ramping up EVERYWHERE, mocks our six months of community sacrifice. Personally, I haven't been to a game store since March. We've just eaten out a few times. We actually were zooming with my dad and Mary during the height of the lockdown. But there are also plenty of people who have gone onto unemployment, losing long-term jobs, and their sacrifice is being thrown away too.
And it's not just opening the islands, but doing it in a horrible, incompetent ways. Yes, a post-arrival test would have deterred people from coming, but so will the chaotic mess of per-island regulations that's developed, some of which could involve islands opting out of the program at a second's notice. (I know that Kauai is pretty unlikely to shut down based purely on Kawakami's badly mathed tier system, because the numbers are astronomically high for the environment; but the average tourist doesn't know that.)
Here's more math: 8,000 people arrived on the islands yesterday. Up from 1,000-2,000 a day during the quarantine. About 6,000 of them did the pre-arrival program. They were of course freely mingling with the 2,000 who did not, both on the plane and in the airport afterward, where they were packed like sardines into lines for at least an hour to try and verify their pre-arrival testing. If there was *any* COVID among those arrivals, it ran through everyone like wildfire. And there were 2,000 untested people, plus at least 20% failure rate among the others.
So did someone have COVID?
Assume that we're mostly getting people from California (which may or may not be true, but you gotta start somewhere with a simple calculation). Currently, a jaw-dropping 1% of their population has COVID (400k/4M). But maybe you instead measure it as new cases, which wouldn't have been known by the travelers either because they were in the incubation period or happened after the test. Call it the new cases over the last 5 days. That's a much more reasonable 14k/4M or about .033%. In the first case (where people are sociopathic enough to travel even if they suspect they have COVID, which I find likely to some degree), there were 20 COVID carriers about the 2,000 people who didn't bother to test and given a 1 in 5 failure rate, about 12 among the tested people. Or 32 new cases to spread COVID on the islands. In the best case they were a 66% chance of 1 COVID case among the untested and about half of that among the tested. Which was still one case on those planes yesterday. Those numbers could easily have jumped by 10x after the plane flight and standing around the terminal without social distancing.
So COVID is coming.
And our politicians don't care enough about the local population to actually think through how to avoid people dying here.
Thanks Governor Ige, thanks Mayor Kawakami. You suck. The deaths are going to be on your heads.
But even beyond that: you pissed away our six months of work on Kauai, just because you were too lazy or incompetent to do it right.
Today my original plan was to go on a hike of the Powerline Trail with a friend, but we've been getting storm warnings about a storm stalling and drenching the island, so we called it off until next week.
But, there hasn't actually been any rain since this morning, just lots of overcast. So I drove back to Koloa (where Kimberly and I were yesterday), parked at the Shops at Kukui'ula (where we ate yesterday) and then walked to Poipu, where I've been enjoying the surf, and not much sun, and typing on my computers. It was a good walk: we used to do it on our first visit in 2001.
It's another enjoyable "last" day, where the beach is pretty empty and I can just chill. No one near me, no COVID even if those 1 to 30 cases are on our island (as opposed to Oahu, where they'd fit right in).
I'll walk back soon, hopefully before all that rain hits.
(And then tomorrow I'll do the actual day of work that I'd have usually done today: I'm sticking to my five-day schedule as much as possible, even though three days remain mostly my own.)
And yesterday Kimberly and I felt much the same when we made some plans to eat out. Which didn't turn out exactly as planned.
The problem is our politicians. For six months, Kauai has been one of the safest counties in the United States of Disease-ridden America. Maui too. Not so much Oahu, where as we saw they don't care the least bit about public health. But on Kauai we've had 59 cases ever. Like I said: safest place.
It's been because of the 14-day quarantine that went up in April. And now, despite the fact that Autumn surge has begun, our idiot politicians have decided to end it.
They're hiding behind a new pre-testing program where someone has to get a negative test no more than three days before they come to the island to avoid the quarantine. But, the program is riddled with problems, as the government's own scientists have told them. They've estimated that 20-30% of COVID-19 will still get through. And, it's no surprise. You add together people testing negative because they're still incubating, people getting COVID after their test, and people getting it on the plane, and I'll be shocked if it's not higher.
So, in one of the two states with a strong natural barrier to entry, we're pissing that away and welcoming COVID in.
Our mayor had an answer: a 3-day quarantine and a required post-arrival test. That would have resolved 99% of the problem and kept Kauai pretty safe. But the governor vetoed it, and our mayor folded like a house of cards.
The problem, one of the problems, is that Kauai's Mayor Kawakami is very inexperienced. As in, he's a surfer-dude that's younger than I am. So, the Big Island mayor, Kim, was fighting for post-arrival testing too, but when he didn't get it, he said, "We're opting out of the pre-arrival program" and within a day he had at least a half-assed version of the post-arrival testing, and then he said, "Oh, there was a mistake in thinking I was opting out." But our mayor's answer was to have the county council send a plea to please let us do our post-arrival testing. And to say: we didn't promise anyone we'd open up on October 15th, only you did. Which is true, but of course that didn't work. Because our mayor was too green to understand that he needed leverage, which is what Mayor Kim on the Big Island created when he opted out.
Our mayor's answer following that particular failure?
A horrible "tiers" program, which is riddled with problems.
First, it punishes the locals by limiting their gathering as tourists bring COVID here. That's Tier 3. And only once COVID has hit a catastrophic rate, where every two weeks we have as many cases of COVID as we had in the last seven months, and only after he's starting locking down local gatherings, only then does he opt out of the failed pre-testing program. That's Tier 2.
Kauai, by the by, has 9 ICU beds. *NINE*. According to the stats, 14%-20% of COVID patients end up hospitalized, and 3-5% end up in the ICU. Assuming the absolute best case, we end up in Tier 2 after a week of 35 cases and have 3% entry to the ICU. That's 11% of our ICU beds gone immediately, and we've got COVID raging through the community. Worst case is 56 cases in the week that things get closed down, and it's likely we've been building up cases for a few weeks to hit that number. So call it 75 cases. At a 5% entry rate to the ICU that's 44% of our ICU beds gone just that week, and by the next week we've probably got people dying in the hospital corridors.
The real issue here is that our Mayor, Kawakami, doesn't think things through, and he especially doesn't math.
So he came up with a retail restriction which would have let so few people into grocery stores and Costco that there would have been starvation on the island. (Someone remathed it for him the next day.)
And he locked up the golf courses _after_ disease had already stopped spreading on the island, and without any consideration to the fact that golf courses obviously weren't a super-spreader locale.
And he ran curfews at night as if the disease could only spread then.
And he told us that he was going to lock the island down for 28 days every time there was a single case of community spread.
So it's not even like he's totally in the tourist industry's pocket; he seemed to be totally protecting the local community back in spring.
It's just that he simultaneously feels he has to do something, swings wildly back and forth, and is incompetent in about 50% of his decisions, in large part because he doesn't math.
So now, the safest county in the United States is opening up in an unsafe way, exposing a population which literally has 0% immunity (to two significant digits, unless you presume infection is 10x what has been reported, then it's only to one), just as COVID is exploding across the United States in the long-promised autumnal bloom.
(And did I mention that only people from the US are eligible for the pre-arrival testing? 'Tis true. And the stats say that they're the most likely to spread COVID of almost anyone in the world.)
So that's why Kimberly and I were doing a final eating out yesterday, because we figured there couldn't be too many tourists on the island after day one.
Though we saw a pair at Costco. Gawking about, wearing expensive, tight clothes, the guy wearing a lei.
But we went to Keoki's last night, because they had a touchless buffet, and it sounded good.
Except that it turned out that their touchless buffet involved standing in line with all the other touchless buffet people. With no social distancing going on. We had reservations, we wanted to support one of our favorite local residents, but upon seeing all of that, we got up from our table, told the hostess we were bailing, and left.
We ate at an outdoor table at Savage Shrimp in the nearby Shops at Kukui'ula. And got ice cream at Lappert's. It was actually quite nice if not as fancy, in no small part because that tourist-heavy shopping center was still almost empty.
Yes, this is all being done for the economy. Yes, I have sympathy for the people now missing their paycheck, themselves thrown under the bus by the sociopathic Republicans in Washington, who have actually admitted that they are preemptively trying to cripple the Biden administration by destroying the economy.
But choosing the absolutely worst time to open up the island, when COVID spread is ramping up EVERYWHERE, mocks our six months of community sacrifice. Personally, I haven't been to a game store since March. We've just eaten out a few times. We actually were zooming with my dad and Mary during the height of the lockdown. But there are also plenty of people who have gone onto unemployment, losing long-term jobs, and their sacrifice is being thrown away too.
And it's not just opening the islands, but doing it in a horrible, incompetent ways. Yes, a post-arrival test would have deterred people from coming, but so will the chaotic mess of per-island regulations that's developed, some of which could involve islands opting out of the program at a second's notice. (I know that Kauai is pretty unlikely to shut down based purely on Kawakami's badly mathed tier system, because the numbers are astronomically high for the environment; but the average tourist doesn't know that.)
Here's more math: 8,000 people arrived on the islands yesterday. Up from 1,000-2,000 a day during the quarantine. About 6,000 of them did the pre-arrival program. They were of course freely mingling with the 2,000 who did not, both on the plane and in the airport afterward, where they were packed like sardines into lines for at least an hour to try and verify their pre-arrival testing. If there was *any* COVID among those arrivals, it ran through everyone like wildfire. And there were 2,000 untested people, plus at least 20% failure rate among the others.
So did someone have COVID?
Assume that we're mostly getting people from California (which may or may not be true, but you gotta start somewhere with a simple calculation). Currently, a jaw-dropping 1% of their population has COVID (400k/4M). But maybe you instead measure it as new cases, which wouldn't have been known by the travelers either because they were in the incubation period or happened after the test. Call it the new cases over the last 5 days. That's a much more reasonable 14k/4M or about .033%. In the first case (where people are sociopathic enough to travel even if they suspect they have COVID, which I find likely to some degree), there were 20 COVID carriers about the 2,000 people who didn't bother to test and given a 1 in 5 failure rate, about 12 among the tested people. Or 32 new cases to spread COVID on the islands. In the best case they were a 66% chance of 1 COVID case among the untested and about half of that among the tested. Which was still one case on those planes yesterday. Those numbers could easily have jumped by 10x after the plane flight and standing around the terminal without social distancing.
So COVID is coming.
And our politicians don't care enough about the local population to actually think through how to avoid people dying here.
Thanks Governor Ige, thanks Mayor Kawakami. You suck. The deaths are going to be on your heads.
But even beyond that: you pissed away our six months of work on Kauai, just because you were too lazy or incompetent to do it right.
Today my original plan was to go on a hike of the Powerline Trail with a friend, but we've been getting storm warnings about a storm stalling and drenching the island, so we called it off until next week.
But, there hasn't actually been any rain since this morning, just lots of overcast. So I drove back to Koloa (where Kimberly and I were yesterday), parked at the Shops at Kukui'ula (where we ate yesterday) and then walked to Poipu, where I've been enjoying the surf, and not much sun, and typing on my computers. It was a good walk: we used to do it on our first visit in 2001.
It's another enjoyable "last" day, where the beach is pretty empty and I can just chill. No one near me, no COVID even if those 1 to 30 cases are on our island (as opposed to Oahu, where they'd fit right in).
I'll walk back soon, hopefully before all that rain hits.
(And then tomorrow I'll do the actual day of work that I'd have usually done today: I'm sticking to my five-day schedule as much as possible, even though three days remain mostly my own.)