We’ve had some people suggesting designating some resorts as lockdown resorts, once there is good enough testing to make sure that only the uninfected can leave again. However, the hotels on Oahu are too integrated into the town for any hope of genuine isolation.
I’m assuming that the state controls airports there. They could revoke gate privileges to airlines who fail to suspend flights to the islands.
Hawaii needs the flights. Cargo comes in on passenger flights. We only have something like a 2 week supply of food in the state.
I’m guessing that it’s really too late.
Why? Hawaii locked down pretty early, including the quarantine, it is pretty free of Covid at present.
Around the world there has been quite a bit of re-purposing of passenger flights. Some cargo is being carried on seats, or seats are being taken out. Regular cargo flights are still flying of course and in some case there are more cargo flights to compensate for fewer passenger flights. I don’t think Hawaii needs to fly passengers in to get the cargo.
That’s just the story I hear from my government. In any event, there isn’t much inclination to shut passenger traffic off altogether. It has already been cut down from around 30,000 per day to around 200 per day. That’s a reasonably major decrease.
The situation is interesting.The state wants tourism entirely curbed (with cases in the islands under control and tourism being the achilles heel) but there are rights for citizens to pass freely between states that make explicity curbing visitation very vulnerable in court. A 14-day quarantine on arrival can be imposed, but it’s extremely difficult to enforce without cooperation from hotels serving as a monitoring agent. So the tourism authority (led by an ex mayor of Honolulu, for what it’s worth), has led an effort to ask its members (hotel owners and operators) to unite in implementing measures at the business level to support what the state wants to achieve. It’s a peer pressure tactic and about 2/3 of (open) hotels have volunteered to implement this key thing, but not 100%. In Hawaii most grocery stores are requiring patrons wear masks to enter (as a private business right), but that’s the proprietor’s policy not law, and I think that’s because legislators know a law could be open to challenge. This is essentially the same thing.
If someone asks for a new key, that front desk agent is supposed to alert a manager who is supposed to alert the national guard who has been activated and is assisting with enforcement of the quarantine. (Upon arrival, tourists register with the national guard, and if they indicate they are staying at the Marriott, then the NG confirms with the Marriott there’s a bona fide reservation, and off they go to check in. If they don’t show up, or try to leave within the 14 days, the NG gets a call from the front desk.) When you have 37% unemployment (which is what HI has right now) and you’re lucky enough to still have that front desk job, I’ll bet you’re not going to reissue a new key if your manager has told you not to. And same for the manager if ownership has said not to.
With that in place, the tourism authority and the state can run PR stories about the enforcement, including stories on hotels using single-use keys, to further discourage travel without using law.
There really aren’t many tourists right now (the point being: what kind of vacation is it if it starts with a 14-day quarantine?). Many hotels are closed, and those that are open are primarily servicing airline pilots and crews, who are servicing empty planes. Ironically, despite the fact that they are going through airports and to the mainland routinely (i.e. arguably highest risk), they are exempt from quarantine under the state’s exemptions, as it would render their jobs impractical to function. So they get regular keys and come and go freely.
It’s not uncommon for people living on the other islands to stay in Oahu hotels when needing medical care not available where they live. Additionally, families or friends will rent a room to host a party or some kind of group gathering. It’s not uncommon that people’s apartments are smaller than a hotel room. And then there’s folks from other islands simply visiting their peeps.
I often fly to Honolulu for work opportunities and make use of the hotels. Some hotels have suites available for transitional and temporary housing for locals and military personnel. There’s this one place I like to stay at (for the proximity to a couple of awesome Japanese restaurants and one killer yoshoku joint) that’s popular for those needing medical treatments not requiring in-patient care. Yeah, my first time there was a real eye-opener when I noticed all the wheelchairs.
The vast bulk of cargo comes to Hawaii via ship. Takes about four days or less to get from California to Honolulu. I’ve been working on the Hawaii run for the past several years, so I know. The thing I’m wondering is that, without all the demand created by the tourists, how is that affecting the ships and their operators? No cargo = no money. However, there is the importance of on-time delivery. You can’t just dump a ship load of produce on the locals when the demand and storage capacity just isn’t there.
Air cargo is utilized for smaller and low-volume items that need to get someplace quickly. Think of critical electronic parts or your magazine subscription. Sometimes, when a ship is so behind schedule and a priority hunk of cargo is going to be late, the shipping company will eat the cost and pay for a plane to deliver.
But there’s a lot of critical cargo that doesn’t; for example, for many medical tests we send the samples to mainland labs; this continues to be a problem that the blood banks have, since donations have to be tested before use, we didn’t have the facilities in the islands, and for a while the labs in California were backlogged. I think air cargo is around 10% of all incoming cargo by weight (I expect higher by value), please correct me if that is far off. Even if some of that could come by sea instead, I can’t see a change like that happening quickly.
The thing I’m wondering is that, without all the demand created by the tourists, how is that affecting the ships and their operators? No cargo = no money.
I assume that those that can survive with fewer trips will have to do so. I wonder if the hit on interisland cargo operations will be more quickly apparent, since the tourist demand on the neighbor islands is a larger fraction of the business than on Oahu.
You can’t just dump a ship load of produce on the locals when the demand and storage capacity just isn’t there.
I hope the pandemic will spur an increase in local production. I’d at least like to see a local dairy back in operation.
Young Brothers, who does interisland shipping, has already reduced their freight runs to about half of what they usually are. Waiting on that car to come over from Oahu to Maui? You may have to wait 2-3 weeks.
The smaller truck farmers, at least on Maui, are having trouble making connections with the farmers’ markets. The little farmer’s market I go to frequently runs out of produce; they were already packing up at 3 when they usually run until 4 last week. Haleakala Ranch will do a bang-up job selling beef but getting dairy production geared up again will take time and effort; the last dairy shut down because they couldn’t make ends meet.
Also (not that the whole “being young keeps you from having bad symptoms of COVID-19” has been pretty thoroughly routed), but Hawaii has a pretty high percentage of elderly folks that are definitely more at risk. Makes sense to keep things pretty locked down.
(but then, so does Florida, and look at what they’re doing…)
Drained is the perfect word for this. On top of that, my wife works full time (and both weekend days) at a garden center doing 10 hr. shifts. I via WFH (slammed right now because it’s a cloud computing company) so the 12 and 8 y/o are pretty much left to their own devices (literally) most of the time.
Now we have the school harassing us because they’re doing their assignments via pen-and-paper and not navigating to google classroom to login. They can see their friends right across the street but can’t go play with them. I tried to explain this to the vice principals (2 schools) and highlight that neither my wife nor I are teachers/counselors/janitors/chefs/gym-coaches/music-teachers/librarians but we put those hats on now as we see fit. If my 12 y/o has to repeat 6th grade she will be f’ing DEVASTATED. We just moved to a new town and our old school district promised not to make anyone repeat a grade due to the shutdown but this district has not. That means all her friends will be a grade above her.
So yeah, you nailed it with drained. Thanks for being so understanding.
Not sure if they’ve since been eclipsed for the top spot, but for a very long time the single biggest private landowner in the US was the Bishop Trust, as in Bernice Pa‘uahi Bishop, the last monarch of Hawai‘i. If you own property there, you probably don’t own the land, you have a 99 year leasehold with the Bishop Trust.
