Dr. Bruce Anderson briefed the State Senate Special Committee on COVID-19 on Wednesday.  He said the critical pieces of getting the state ready to reopen the economy include having adequate testing, adequate contact tracing, and the ability to quarantine and isolate those people who test positive for COVID-19.

Anderson said statewide, the maximum number of tests that can be performed now is 3,000 per day.

Anderson said the contact tracing process is labor intensive.  Each contact may have up to 100 people with whom they have been in close contact, and he now estimates it’s around 20 per infected person.

He used the example of the outbreak associated with the McDonald’s in Kona.  The official case count is 32.  He said contact tracing has proved challenging because some of the close contacts were Marshallese and do not speak English, and DOH needed interpreters available to help with the discussion.  The contact tracing discussion can take up to 2 hours per person.

Those people who are determined to be close contacts of somebody infected are usually tested, definitely if they have symptoms of COVID-19 but now, even if they have no symptoms since it’s been proven that people can pass the virus even without any symptoms.

Dr. Anderson said they want to keep individual victims from being exposed and possibly shamed by the community.   He also said they finally revealed the name of the restaurant in Kona as being McDonald’s because they got the owner’s permission and it seemed obvious it would get out anyway.  He said in the future, they plan to release the names of facilities if there are a number of positive cases.  He acknowledged that the HIPPA privacy laws apply to individuals, not businesses.

Dr. Anderson said he believes they’re at or close to the end of the contact tracing for the McDonald’s outbreak and believe they’ve been able to track everybody down who might have been exposed.