Just over a year ago I took a look at another island that was comparable to New Zealand in being a developed society with a fair degree of wealth, good healthcare services and all-round good government (at least as good as it gets), just to see how they were doing with the dreaded Chinese Lung Rot.

Hawaii: Troubles in Another Pacific Paradise

They were not doing too well despite following the same path, but doing so even more harshly:

The island state did what New Zealand and many other nations did: full lockdown. Tourism vanished of course and any other visitors were told to quarantine for the usual 14 days. But Hawaii went further, jailing a few people for violating lockdown orders. Moreover there has been a mandate in place requiring mask-wearing indoors since April and now even outdoors.

But unlike NZ that did not seem to buy them much success as cases, hospitalisations and deaths rose. This graph in particular showed problems with the mask strategy.

The mask aspect deserves it’s own post, but I thought I’d check up to see how they were doing now following the great US vaccine rollout.

The answer is …. not too well. In fact you probably didn’t know Hawaii just hit an all time high for covid hospitalisations – because the MSM can’t blame a lack of masks, lack of vaccines, lack of lockdown harshness, President Trump, Trump voters, or Republicans in general for this data. Hawaii is as solidly Democrat Party as California or Illinois.

The good news is that the state still ranks 50th out of all the states for having the lowest death toll: 405 per million. But in the wake of these events it’s clear that it must be due to factors other than masks and lockdowns. After all, their death rate is still much higher than ours: can we honestly say our lockdown and masking was better than theirs?

The vaccine would be the obvious answer, but in fact the death rate peaked in late January before the vaccine rollout was even up to full speed, let alone put across a majority of the most vulnerable (elderly and already sick people), let alone the rest of the population. Still, given the way death tolls among the elderly have been reduced dramatically in the US and Britain it’s almost certain that it’s saving lives now.

In Hawaii, 1,041,430 people or 73% of the state has received at least one dose.

Overall, 775,775 people or 54% of Hawaii’s population has been fully vaccinated.

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Some other factor must be at work to enable such a low death rate. The warm climate? Outdoors lifestyle? Lower proportion of elderly? Having several thousand miles of empty Pacific Ocean around it?

Only time and scientific medical analysis will tell.

However, the Delta variant has come ashore:

Faced with a flood of COVID-19 patients, Queen’s Medical Center West Oahu has declared a “disaster” as the hospital seeks additional support.

“Today we declared an internal state of emergency, so that means that all hands are on deck,” said Jason Chang, of the Queen’s Health Systems.

Officials say Queen’s West Oahu is at capacity and every bed in the facility is full right now.
…
Has stopped accepting new patients
…
Other Hawaii hospitals are expected to follow suit.

The three points that need to be made are these.

First, this has happened despite a 54% vaccination rate, and lengthy, tough, mask and lockdown mandates.

Second, the vaccines effectiveness seems to be declining with time, as noted elsewhere in the world. In this they now appear to be more like a treatment for the disease than a true vaccine, but then that’s the reason why a vaccine has never been developed for the common cold; the Rhinoviruses and Coronaviruses that cause them mutate too quickly – but largely without killing their victims, such is the evolutionary pressure of re-production, and the reason Ebola did not used to spread far, killing a village before people could escape to another village.

Third, although people are in hospital there’s no mention of serious ICU levels of sickness and the death rates are not rising despite the surge starting in mid-July. This matches the data from other nations showing that Delta is more infectious but far less lethal than the Alpha variant, itself barely above flu lethality.

Early diagnosis of more severe cases (rather than identifying all cases), seeking effective new treatments, and developing medical and healthcare resources would all be smarter moves.

Basically Hawaii needs to say “aloha” to the target of “zero COVID”, which is no longer possible, dump the mask and lockdown bullshit and return to the traditional pandemic approaches of:

  • Tracing infected people and quarantining them, rather than locking everybody up.
  • Focus on protecting the vulnerable, especially with early diagnosis of more severe cases (rather than identifying all cases)
  • Seek effective new treatments of the sick.
  • Boost medical and healthcare resources.

l’ll leave you with this.

Will New Zealand learn any lessons from this, or are we still convinced that our way is the best in the world because “only 26 people have died of Covid-19”?