Collaborate to increase virus testing statewide

Doctors in the medical community report that people can be asymptomatic or have mild symptoms and pass on the coronavirus.

Now the state Department of Health says it will be doing statewide surveillance to find out if there is community spread. However, people either need to see their doctors or go to regional testing centers.

So what happens to those who are asymptomatic or have mild symptoms? How will the statewide surveillance detect those people?

I don’t think statisticians would agree that this is a valid experimental design.

Monitoring for coronavirus needs to capture all who are susceptible in the population. If there are insufficient American manufactured tests, why can’t we get them from the World Health Organization or elsewhere?

Collaboration is an important part of science. Why are we not collaborating with those countries (states) that have more experience with the disease than Hawaii?

Michael Nishimoto

Kahului

Strict regimens help Singapore handle crisis

Lt. Gov. Josh Green said the state should be doing “thousands of tests to assess the full scope of the disease” so “we have a clearer idea on how far COVID-19 may have spread in Hawaii” (“Coronavirus testing in Hawaii comes under fire,” Star-Advertiser, March 10).

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said to contain COVID-19, you must contain it internally, as well as contain the influx of people with the disease coming in from the outside.

One of the worst-hit nations outside of China, Singapore, has had no coronavirus deaths as of Friday. Singapore has a strict hospital and home quarantine regimen, government quarantine facilities, contact tracing system and surveillance program proactively looking for cases of infection. Quarantined people report their location with text and mobile software.

Any sane policy would be to prevent cruise ships from docking for the duration of the coronavirus pandemic to contain the influx of people coming in from the outside.

Renee Ing

Makiki

City right to challenge oil, gas companies

On the same day the Caldwell administration announced Honolulu is filing suit to hold fossil fuel companies accountable for the mounting costs and impacts of climate change (“City sues fossil fuel businesses over climate change costs,” Star-Advertiser, March 10), H. Sterling Burnett’s article claiming fossil fuels are the only answer to meet our energy needs appeared in the Star-Advertiser (“Oil, gas production on public lands is good for U.S., world,” March 9).

So who’s right? The continual increase in temperature over the past decades, the rise in sea level, and increase in weather-related catastrophes strongly suggests that the mayor is on the right side. Furthermore, the city administration has been on the right side in taking steps to address climate change, such as pushing for the passage of Bill 25 and establishing the Climate Change Commission.

The city deserves to be commended for its forward thinking and not listening to those from the Heartland Institute who continue to look backward.

Paul Bernstein

Aina Haina

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