Hawaii’s pandemic-era travel policy, Safe Travels, sunsets today as Hawaii joins other states that are relying instead on their knowledge of the virus and other tools to lower COVID-19 case counts and hospitalizations.
Some 22,000 travelers were expected to enter Hawaii through Safe Travels on Friday as Hawaii became the last state to end emergency rules for domestic travel, said Sheri Kajiwara, Hawaii Safe Travels administrator.
Hawaii’s travel policy change comes as Airlines for America and leading U.S. airline CEOs have requested the lifting of pandemic travel policies, including the federal transportation mask mandate and pre-departure testing. Hawaii’s international visitors still have to meet federal requirements before entering the U.S.
Altogether, more than 12 million travelers, including about 10 million visitors, entered Hawaii through the program in the past 17 months, with 97% avoiding quarantine, Kajiwara said.
The entry process was a comfort to some and a frustratingly expensive process that impeded recovery of Hawaii tourism and business to others. The state spent tens of millions of mostly federal dollars to stand up the program, which in its latter stages cost roughly $2 million to $3 million a month.
But Gov. David Ige credits Safe Travels, along with community cooperation for COVID-19 emergency policies, as the reason that two years into the pandemic, Hawaii can still say that it had the fewest cases per capita and the second-lowest death rate in the country.
Ige also credited Safe Travels with helping Hawaii’s economy recover and getting people back to work. He said Hawaii’s unemployment rate has improved from about 22% when he first ordered a travel quarantine in March 2020 to 4.3% in February.
“Hawaii’s handling of the pandemic was better than most states’,” Ige said Thursday during an interview with the Honolulu Star-Advertiser.
But he was quick to point out that the pandemic is not over, and even after this one ends, he anticipates that there might be more infectious disease in Hawaii’s future.
Ige said he’s confident that Hawaii is well positioned to sunset Safe Travels, especially since overall cases and hospitalizations have dropped dramatically, with the number of cases that are travel-related continuing to be 1% or less of the total cases. Ige said the state has high vaccination rates, effective health care treatments, including therapeutics, and oral antiviral treatments. Hawaii also has a robust testing and surveillance system that includes genomic sequencing, which allows scientists to detect new variants, he said.
But Ige said that he has talked to a federal task force about the U.S. adopting future travel policies that include being able to require tests and being able to verify tests.
“Just as 9/11 instituted changes in security on travel in general with the new TSA checks and those kinds of things, I really am advocating that they should establish some process for health emergencies and being able to require testing and other kinds of health screening,” he said. “Because we don’t want to end up having to see the same kind of shutdown of the (visitor) industry when an infectious disease starts to circulate in the community.”
In the meantime, Ige said, Hawaii will continue to monitor COVID-19 variants, cases counts and hospitalizations worldwide and will rely more heavily on new forms of technology like sewage testing, which started in the past few weeks and can be used to quickly pinpoint where COVID-19 counts are rising in Hawaii.
Ige said identifying the virus in sewage “gives us a four- to 10-day head start on recognizing the presence of the virus and the variant in our community.”
If the state finds signs of the virus in a community, Ige said, it can distribute at-home testing kits and urge people to wear masks.
What isn’t likely to happen is another lockdown, he said.
“The whole notion of a lockdown would probably not happen again,” Ige said. “We are just in a very different environment today than we were two years ago when the pandemic was just starting.”
As more visitors return to a more open Hawaii, Ige encouraged support for Hawaii Tourism Authority’s efforts to manage tourism through Destination Management Action Plans. Ige said the earlier COVID-19 drop in tourism provided an opportunity to develop these plans to ensure that communities were not negatively affected when visitor counts rose.
While Ige is supportive of HTA, the state Legislature still hasn’t agreed on funding for the agency.
In this next phase of the pandemic, lawmakers also are trying to figure out how to reuse some of Safe Travels’ infrastructure and technology investments, including the roughly $27 million that was spent on 114 thermal cameras and 98 facial imaging cameras that allowed screeners to track those with high temperatures.
Early in the pandemic, Hawaii installed thermal screening, which some decision-makers considered necessary due to the diversity of the state’s visitors, who come from around the globe.
Two resolutions in the state Legislature, SCR 193 and SR 186, have asked the Department of Transportation to develop a plan for “the cost-effective disposition of the Safe Travels thermal screening and tracing camera equipment and other related operations.”
Sen. Sharon Moriwaki (D, Kakaako-McCully-Waikiki) said, “It was $27 million for the cameras — you cannot let them become a white elephant. Who knows when we might need it. I want to know their plan.”
Sen. Glenn Wakai (D, Kalihi-Salt Lake-Aliamanu) said, “If we made that investment, we should continue to use it. It’s COVID today. Who knows what it will be tomorrow?
“There’s no clear vision. There’s no plan. It’s ridiculous. These things shouldn’t be tossed like something at a yard sale.”
State Department of Transportation spokesperson Jai Cunningham said the state might repurpose the tracking cameras. But Cunningham said federal regulations prevent airport personnel from monitoring the thermal cameras. During the pandemic the DOT relied on the National Guard to identify and isolate passengers with temperatures 100.4 degrees or higher, he said.
In testimony to lawmakers, DOT has said that future thermal camera use is dependent on the state funding staff costs to monitor temperature readings and support the camera system.
The Hawaii National Guard’s COVID-19 joint task force concluded its mission earlier this month. For much of the pandemic, Hawaii guardsmen were stationed at each major airport to help enforce the state’s Safe Travels program.
As of Friday night, COVID- 19 screening duties ended for some 500 Roberts workers who were assigned to COVID-19 contracts. Soon the state will dismantle or repurpose the temporary screening facilities that screeners were using throughout state airports.
The Hawaii Safe Travels digital platform, found on travel.hawaii.gov, will no longer be available after 2 a.m. today. The Hawaii SMART Health Card application, which is found on the Hawaii Safe Travels website, also shut down. The state said existing data will be secured, encrypted and stored offline in a safe manner. After three years the data will be destroyed.
Angela Keen, founder of Kapu Breakers, a community group that helped officials find quarantine breakers, cautioned against disbanding Safe Travels infrastructure too quickly.
“I’m comfortable with sunsetting Safe Travels, but we have to be careful. There are already states and countries with rises again,” Keen said. “Tearing it all down is not the answer, as it could cost more to put it back up. We want it to be available if we need it.”
