It is welcome news indeed to hear of Kaiser Permanente Hawaii easing visitor restrictions at its Moanalua Medical Center, to allow admitted patients to have one visitor each day. Also, outpatient surgery patients will be allowed one companion in a dedicated waiting area.

Throughout months of coronavirus lockdown, anecdotes emerged of emotionally painful isolation wrought by strict no-visitors-allowed policies at hospitals and similar facilities. Let’s hope Kaiser’s humane easing of companionship rules will spur others to follow suit.

UH seeks COVID-19 patients

It’s no small matter to opt in to be a clinical trial volunteer for a treatment of a disease as pernicious as COVID-19. Nobody knows how well or poorly a drug will do against a novel coronavirus. Still, University of Hawaii medical school researchers are seeking 40 with the active disease to volunteer, though these would be patients without underlying health problems.

It’s probably a good time to start looking: The count of new infection cases is ticking up, as unfortunate as that is on every other front.