On Friday, members of the State Senate Special Committee on COVID-19 made an unannounced visit to the State Department of Health, as documented by Hawaii News Now.   State Senator Donovan delaCruz, head of the Committee, invited the network to join them on the visit.

In numerous contentious Senate Hearings, DelaCruz and the other members of the Committee had grilled both Dr. Bruce Anderson, head of the Department, and State Epidemiologist Sarah Park about why contact tracing did not seem to be happening, despite Anderson’s and Park’s insistence that they had enough tracers and things were going well.

After the most recent hearing on Thursday, where Park again said the process of contact tracing was moving along fine,  the Senators found just a handful of tracers at the Department.  Tracers told the Senators that they often have more than 100 cases they are expected to trace, and may get 20 or 30 new cases a day.  They said they aren’t able to actually do the tracing for everybody and are now prioritizing people 65 and older, as they are at most risk.

There was also a group of National Guard troops in a separate room doing tracing work.  And Dr. Park said the majority of her staff was working from home, but didn’t say how many were doing contact tracing.

Dr. Sarah Park was at the office, and said she was glad for the visit as it highlighted that the Department is understaffed and could use more funding.  But she and Dr. Anderson have said there are more than 400 people who have been trained at the University of Hawaii–and Park has also said it’s not that easy to bring them on, that they need further training to understand the DOH process.  The training at UH was a joint development effort of the Department of Health and UH.

The Federal CARES Act has provided more than $30 million to the State for contact tracing.

This morning, KITV4 reported that Dr. Bruce Anderson called the unannounced visit “reprehensible.”

For the Hawaii News Now report, click here.

For the KITV report, click here.

Photo is Dr. Sarah Park from the State Department of Health web site.