As state leaders drop COVID-19 safety measures right and left, I wanted to give a shout-out to Hawaii: the one state that has kept its indoor mask mandate in place during this time. Gov. David Ige currently intends to keep the measure in place despite the CDC’s new guidance, according to local reports.
Hawaii faces unique challenges during COVID-19 surges, since its island location makes it difficult for healthcare staff support to come in—or for patients to be transferred out of the state. These challenges have previously led Gov. Ige to call for tourists to avoid traveling to Hawaii, and to me, seem like good motivation for this state to keep cases low.
Hawaii also has the second-lowest COVID-19 death rate, after Vermont—likely in part because of the state’s mask requirement and other safety measures.
A snippet of Hawaii’s new-and-improved school COVID-19 case reporting. Screenshot taken on August 8.
As noted in our “Opening” project intro, many states have paused their school COVID-19 case reporting for the summer—and a few have stopped reporting school cases entirely. Hawaii appears to be an exception: this state actually improved its reporting for the new school year.
Where the state previously just reported total cases for each island (or county) of Hawaii, it’s now reporting cases by individual school. Hawaii also reports the date a case was reported and the last date that the COVID-positive individual was on campus.
It’s still not perfect; ideally, Hawaii would also give us in-person enrollment or other numbers to contextualize these cases. But it’s a big improvement, useful for both Hawaii public school families and researchers like yours truly. Thanks Hawaii!
Discussing my exposure notifications reporting at the webinar!
This week, I had the opportunity to participate in a webinar about the future of exposure notifications, the digital contact tracing systems used in about half of U.S. states. The webinar was hosted by PathCheck Foundation, a global nonprofit that works on public health technology—including exposure notification apps.
I talked about my recent feature in MIT Technology Review, which investigated usage rates and public opinion around exposure notification technology. Other panelists included Jeremy Hall, project manager of Hawaii’s exposure notification system, Sam Zimmerman, director of exposure notification programs at PathCheck, and Ramesh Raskar, technology professor at MIT and PathCheck founder.
It was a great session, with discussion ranging from the challenges of implementing exposure notification technology in the U.S. to the ways this technology may be used for future infectious disease outbreaks. With a year of work under their belts, Zimmerman and Raskar brought insider perspectives to the challenges that I had seen from the outside in my reporting. For example, Raskar discussed how Massachusetts’ own exposure notification app is still in a trial run even though PathCheck approached the state public health agency offering to provide that technology in summer 2020.
I was also excited to hear from Hall on how Hawaii’s public health agency promoted exposure notification technology in their state. At the time I collected data for my Technology Review piece, Hawaii had about 650,000 people in the state’s exposure notification system, including those who downloaded the app and those who turned on the EN Express option in their iPhone settings. That represented 46% of the state’s population—a larger share than any other state.
Since I did my data collection, Hawaii has added an additional 250,000 users, I learned from Hall. This includes both Hawaii residents and tourists; tourists with iPhones get push notifications encouraging them to opt into EN Express when they enter the state. Hawaii has also worked with county public health departments and local organizations to publicize its exposure notification system. I think the state could be a model for other public health institutions working to implement exposure notification technology.
If you’d like to watch the webinar, it was recorded and is available at this link—you’ll just need to put in a name and email. The conversation starts about one minute in.
The majority of states do not collect or report detailed information on how their residents became infected with COVID-19. This type of information would come from contact tracing, in which public health workers call up COVID-19 patients to ask about their activities and close contacts. Contact tracing has been notoriously lacking in the U.S. due to limited resources and cultural pushback.
COVID-19 Data Dispatch 