Hawaii: Few COVID Cases Among Trans-Pacific Visitors

Hawaii Has Seen Few COVID-19 Positive Cases from Trans-Pacific Visitors within the first month of Hawaii Reopening. Starting October 15, 2020, Hawaii visitors and returning residents with negative pre-travel COVID-19 PCR tests have skipped quarantine.

While Hawaii has sought to test ~10% of arrivals with a voluntary post-travel test, few have agreed, worried that testing positive would ruin their vacation. Instead, the best data have come from the Big Island of Hawaii, which until about a week ago, required all arrivals to take a rapid antigen test. Those that tested positive (and there were many false positives) had to immediately take a more accurate COVID-19 PCR test.

Back towards the end of October, 6 out of 9323 passengers tested were positive for COVID-19, or 0.06%. More recently, as of November 11, 19 out of over 15,000 passengers tested were COVID-19 positive, or 0.13%. That's akin to just over one of every 1000 passengers testing positive, and considerably lower than the state's current average test positivity rate over the past 7 days of 2.2%, or even the much lower positivity rate of Maui County, which had an average 0.8% positivity rate.

Hawaii has had its share of scofflaws and quarantine breakers, both visitors and returning residents. Nevertheless, the state's comparatively harsh (for the U.S.) penalties of up to $5000 in fines or up to 1 year in prison, if convicted of violating the mandatory quarantine, has convinced many arrivals to undergo pre-travel COVID-19 PCR testing. Pre-travel testing must be done with one of Hawaii's approved partners. The approved partner list has helped prevent the potential for fake test results that's been a problem for some other jurisdictions, and most travelers are motivated to be careful in the days leading up to the test to obtain a negative COVID-19 result that allows them to avoid the otherwise mandatory 14-day quarantine.

Hawaii has recently added 11 new testing partners (these are highlighted in bold font below).

Hawaii Approved COVID-19 Testing Partners as of 11/15/20

American Family Care (AFC)
AFC Urgent Care Portland
American Samoa Department of Health
Atlas Genomics
Bartell Drugs
Capstone Clinic
Carbon Health
CityHealth Urgent Care at Oakland Airport
Clarity Lab Solutions
Clinical Laboratories of Hawaii
Color
Costco/AZOVA
CVS Health
Diagnostic Laboratory Services (Hawaii)
Discovery Health MD
Go Health Urgent Care
Hawaii Pacific Health
Kaiser Permanente
Minit Medical
Quest Diagnostics
National Kidney Foundation of Hawaiʻi’s Consortium, through an agreement with the City and County of Honolulu
S&G Labs Hawai‘i LLC
UC San Diego Health
University of Washington Medicine
Urgent Care Hawaii
Vault Health
Walgreens
WestPac Labs
XpresCheck