Some experts in the medical field are calling for Hawaii to be shut down for 30 days as the COVID-19 pandemic worsens and there is no crisis plan in sight.
The idea behind an economic shutdown is to allow frontline health care workers catch up and develop plans to care for their increased caseloads.
"When someone is infected with delta variant of COVID, they have about 1,000 times to 1,200 times as much virus in them than those who had original type COVID, so you can see that people get sicker much faster. It used to be that somewhere between three and seven days you'd start showing sickness, but now it's three to five days with a peak of 3.71 days. So people are spreading much more virus and they're spreading it much sooner, and that's also making it very challenging," Hawaii Department of Health Director Dr. Libby Char said, according to KITV4 Island News.
Although the talks of shutting down have been swarming the internet, Gov. David Ige (D) wanted to clarify that he has no intentions at this time to take such drastic measures.
"There have been rumors circulating about a shutdown in Hawaii," Ige wrote in a Facebook post. "I want to clear the record that there are currently no plans to shut down. All posts on social media and being distributed by other means are not true. Official announcements will always come from official channels. Mahalo."
Dr. Tim Brown, an infectious disease expert and senior fellow at the East-West Center, also suggests enforcing the mask mandate and requiring vaccinations for entry to restaurants, bars, gyms, houses of worship or other indoor facilities, according to KITV4 Island News.
Other experts suggest reimposing the pretravel testing requirement and cutting the numbers of tourists in half.
"It's amazing to me that last year, with far fewer cases, we were willing to impose a lockdown," Brown told KITV4 Island News. "This year," we're not willing to do anything when we've got an average of 729 cases per day for the last three days."