A company providing COVID-19 testing at Hawaii County’s three major airports was ousted by the county, costing 100 workers their jobs.
West Hawaii Today reported the company, Premier Medical Group, also said it hasn’t been paid for $1.5 million in testing kits, the story said.
“We had several hundred employees we scraped out of nowhere to do this,” the company’s Hawaii Island medical director, Dr. Ka‘ohi Dang Akiona, told the news agency. “A lot of people from our community are going to lose their jobs and their paychecks abruptly. I cannot imagine how this is going to help anybody in the community.”
Premier was contracted by former Mayor Harry Kim’s administration to conduct post-arrival testing at the airports, West Hawaii Today reported. When federal coronavirus relief funding ran out Dec. 15, 2020, the new mayor, Mitch Roth, said the partnership would continue with funding from an unnamed private philanthropist.
“Between the dates of Dec, 15, 2020, and March 31, 2021, the county of Hawaii relinquished all fiscal responsibility related to post-arrival airport testing to our private philanthropist partners who created a new contract with Premier Medical Group,” Roth said in a statement, the story said.
On April 1, the county resumed paying for the testing and decided to hire a different company, the mayor said.
“PMG had notified us of a steep increase in rates, which led us to part ways,” Roth said.
The county is not responsible for paying Premier from Dec. 15 to March 31, the mayor said.
“They had a private contract that the county was not a part of,” he said. “From April 1 to April 14 we have a contract which we will pay.”
Some city council members questioned the abrupt change in testing companies.
“So this transition that happened, not smoothly, not instilling confidence and calm in both the constituents and workers at the airport,” Kona Councilwoman Rebecca Villegas told West Hawaii Today. “A system that had actually been working and we had great feedback.”
The story identified the new testing company as Basis Diagnosis Inc. The private philanthropist who funded the testing from December to March 31 was identified as Marc Benioff, founder and CEO of Salesforce Inc.
Roth announced April 14 that "a state of emergency continues to exists due to the imminent danger or threat of emergency on Hawaiʻi Island from the COVID-19 pandemic."