That’s how Karl Kim, a UH professor of Urban and Regional Planning, and an expert in disaster preparedness, summarized the failure of Hawaii’s Covid-19 responses in a Star-Advertiser op-ed this week (“Column: Poor data management worsens Hawaii’s COVID-19 crisis“).
Kim, who among other things is director of the National Disaster Preparedness Training Center, said a basic need in any disaster is data.
“We need reliable, accurate, timely, comprehensive, actionable information on who has the disease, how they caught it, and how it is spreading in our community,” Kim wrote.
And that’s a key area in which Hawaii has failed.
Kim put it rather bluntly: “The management, sharing and communications of data on the disease have been deplorable.”
It’s no surprise that the public has been confused, since there has been little or no attention paid to explaining the rationale behind the various restrictions established by the governor and mayors.
The connection between policy and data has been noticeably absent, Kim argues.
Where are the analyses to support decisions to shutter businesses or force schools to go online? Where is the evidence that closing beaches and parks will reduce the disease? Why aren’t data on the bad behavior of super spreaders or risky events shared with us? Why do we have to piece this together from limited media and social media posts or aggregate statistics lumped together at the zip code level?
In watching daily press conferences, the same tired information is repeated with little connection to protective action. General slogans such as wear a mask or wash your hands are offered rather than targeted identification and actions to curtail the disease.
Why haven’t high-risk locations and activities been systematically identified? Why were gatherings of 10 or more targeted, only to be changed to five or more? Why haven’t the interactions and behaviors extracted from contact tracing been shared, analyzed and presented to motivate positive collective, corrective actions?
Stigmatization of the disease is a real problem. Yet, we need to bring it out in the open so that families and communities can work to contain it and protect those likely to be harmed. We need open, transparent data to take the necessary precautions as to avoiding physical contact and exposure and making informed choices as to work, school, church and social activities.
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The collection of data (contact tracing, especially) has been deplorable as well, so it’s no wonder that “the management, sharing and communications of data on the disease have been deplorable.” Our lack of data may be more dangerous than what’s done with it.
Yes, that is *exactly* the problem … unless the real problem is that they are making policy in total disregard to what the data they do have would support.
If you can stoke enough fear in the public — and lord knows, they try — then you may get a large enough buy-in from the public for anything you do under the auspices of “protecting” them. But there will always be people who cannot be manipulated through fear-mongering who want to see and understand the data that supports your actions.
These are the people who have been left out in the cold, wondering, for example, where the data is that supports closing parks and beaches when *all* of the clusters of cases they’ve been hearing about came from indoors — and usually from government-run facilities like Honolulu Hale or prisons or detention centers? Where is the data that shows large numbers of cases where people contracting this disease while out in the warm sun, exactly where the virus fares worst? Where is the data showing that, despite beaches and parks having been open for 8-10 weeks prior to the sudden surge in cases, that suddenly in the last two weeks they have become a significant source of spread? Why do they not normalize the data they do have to account for the fact that they are doing 4-5 times more testing now than they were in February (and are therefore not surprisingly catching many times more of the cases than they did back then)?
And for God’s sake please explain why suddenly in the last month there are so many more cases where the “risk factor” is “pending/unknown” when those cases were almost nil for all previous months.
They should be providing the data that answers all of these questions (and many, many more) so that they can get buy-in from people guided by their intellect rather than their fears.