The insidiousness of the coronavirus cannot be overstated. There are no confirmed cases for weeks, then suddenly, an outbreak rages. Especially in close-quarter environments, such as long-term care facilities and prisons, the deadly virus can quickly spread — and that’s why it’s crucial to constantly ensure strict hygiene protocols and uphold cleanliness standards.

Already, outbreaks have occurred locally in nursing homes — most alarmingly at Hilo’s Yukio Okutsu State Veterans Home — as well as in Oahu’s Dillingham jail and now, at the Waiawa Correctional Facility.

With COVID-19 cases surging across the mainland, it’s imperative that care homes receive laser-focused attention, to safeguard kupuna now living under the burden of social-distancing restrictions. With family and friends kept largely at arm’s length to prevent COVID spread, understandably, it now falls on advocates and regulators, such as the state Department of Health (DOH), to ensure better monitoring of in-facility living conditions.

To that end, the senior advocacy group Kokua Council is right to call on the DOH to provide more timely information after unannounced inspections of nursing homes hard-hit by COVID-19, including the Yukio Okutsu home, and to post inspection reports on DOH’s website. State law requires such unannounced inspections, plus timely posting of reports within five days of inspection conclusion.

The Yukio Okutsu home, tragically, saw more than two dozen coronavirus deaths and more than 100 testing positive. At least three lawsuits have been filed against then-operator Avalon Health Care, and the state’s Hawaii Health Systems Corp. is taking over operations.

Being directly responsible for Yukio Okutsu operations would seem to be impetus for the state to step up transparency about recent inspections at the facility. Instead, the DOH’s Office of Health Care Assurance, while saying it has continued nursing-home inspections overall throughout the pandemic, said inspections of Yukio Okutsu are federal and that law requires posting of inspection reports of only “state-licensed care facilities.”

That sounds appallingly weak. What the lower bounds of law require should not be an excuse here, given Yukio Okutsu’s tragic recent history; the bar should be higher, at what is the right thing to do.

And the right thing, as far as the public and nursing-home families are concerned, is to provide as much disclosure as possible, to ensure that optimal life-saving conditions are being met in Hawaii’s most-vulnerable facilities.