Update:
Starting 3/26, there will be a mandatory 14-day quarantine for all arrivals to Hawaii. Residents may quarantine at home. Tourists will be required to not leave their hotel room or vacation rental unless they are seeking medical care. Tourists are fully responsible for the cost of the quarantine and there is a $5,000 fine and up to a year in jail for noncompliance.
After the coronavirus was officially declared a pandemic, ticket prices from airlines plummeted.
This meant that a lot of people are now 'self quarantining' in Hawaii. A family friend of ours had an AirBNB who was, I swear to god, booked by a couple who had been exposed to the coronavirus and was saying, 'we want to quarantine in Paradise.'
Anyway, so our national parks were closed for obvious reasons. This new gigantic flood of tourists poured into the county parks and beaches instead, meaning that beaches were getting absolutely bombarded with tourists. There were so many people that communities all over the Big Island (where I'm from) actually banded together to forcibly shut the parks ourselves with cones and everything because the government hadn't done anything yet. Irate tourists called the cops, and they came down. The cones went back up. The cops came back with more cars. They left. The cones went back up again.
They didn't come back.
And finally, as of right now, the state FINALLY shut the county parks too, so it was just an early shutdown. There is currently a community effort to actually patrol the park borders to keep tourists from sneaking in because we know the police aren't going to do anything, they're stretched thin as it is.
tl;dr Stop coming to Hawaii for a cheap vacation. Everything's closed now including parks and restaurants. Also, we don't want coronavirus to become a huge problem here especially because we are extremely understaffed medically. We can't handle a pandemic, there are like....50 respirators on the Big Island and 20 ICU beds or something. We can't handle anything big - any major medical operations can't be done on this island, we have very few doctors and all of the 'big deal' stuff needs to be flown to Honolulu or the mainland.
Starting 3/26, there will be a mandatory 14-day quarantine for all arrivals to Hawaii. Residents may quarantine at home. Tourists will be required to not leave their hotel room or vacation rental unless they are seeking medical care. Tourists are fully responsible for the cost of the quarantine and there is a $5,000 fine and up to a year in jail for noncompliance.
After the coronavirus was officially declared a pandemic, ticket prices from airlines plummeted.
This meant that a lot of people are now 'self quarantining' in Hawaii. A family friend of ours had an AirBNB who was, I swear to god, booked by a couple who had been exposed to the coronavirus and was saying, 'we want to quarantine in Paradise.'
Anyway, so our national parks were closed for obvious reasons. This new gigantic flood of tourists poured into the county parks and beaches instead, meaning that beaches were getting absolutely bombarded with tourists. There were so many people that communities all over the Big Island (where I'm from) actually banded together to forcibly shut the parks ourselves with cones and everything because the government hadn't done anything yet. Irate tourists called the cops, and they came down. The cones went back up. The cops came back with more cars. They left. The cones went back up again.
They didn't come back.
And finally, as of right now, the state FINALLY shut the county parks too, so it was just an early shutdown. There is currently a community effort to actually patrol the park borders to keep tourists from sneaking in because we know the police aren't going to do anything, they're stretched thin as it is.
tl;dr Stop coming to Hawaii for a cheap vacation. Everything's closed now including parks and restaurants. Also, we don't want coronavirus to become a huge problem here especially because we are extremely understaffed medically. We can't handle a pandemic, there are like....50 respirators on the Big Island and 20 ICU beds or something. We can't handle anything big - any major medical operations can't be done on this island, we have very few doctors and all of the 'big deal' stuff needs to be flown to Honolulu or the mainland.
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