Does this American 🇺🇸Need to Travel ✈ to Greece for COVID-19 Testing While Some Hawaii Residents Cry “Hoax!”

Greece, a Small Country Doing Public Health Right

Greece, with its ancient ruins available for tourists to see, is about to reopen for much needed tourism. Greek government officials have told the world that as far as the worldwide pandemic is concerned, Greece is a safe place to visit. Through widespread testing and strict quarantine procedures for its citizens and travellers the country has kept COVID-19 to a minimum. I listen carefully to news from countries that have effectively dealt with the treat of COVID-19 and indeed, widespread testing seems to be of paramount importance. That’s what public health officials in the United States have been saying.

Hawaii has been fortunate. We have had relatively few COVID-19 cases. Just yesterday, May 15, 2020, o heaed two people speculating that COVID-19 is probably a hoax. Have you ever met anyone who knows someone who knows someone who caught it here? No. I don’t believe COVID-19 is a hoax although I can’t go see other locales. I doubt all of the media could uniformly cooperate to pull off such a hoax and to what end? We have been fortunate to be naturally quarantined from the rest of the world and within the state the separation of islands helps.

Our nation’s leadership speaks work on a vaccine but best case scenario is 2022..? A scientist the POTUS had fired spoke to Congress about the sister we are facing without universal testing and said leadership ignores his words at our peril. The response? The scientist was called bitter, and he was accused of considering himself a soloist when he was just one if a choir. Seriously? Any scientist working with others at the federal level must be good enough to carry a tune. He must know something. And what about his warning? No comment.

Hawaii needs it’s tourism too. But can we safely reopen on wishful thinking? We ask visitors to quarantine themselves in their far flung destinations. There’s no one place new arrivals go for quarantine (like Greece) and enforcing the voluntary quarantine (an oxymoronic arrangement) is spotty. Hawaii is not testing all new arrivals. Or residents.

My Fingers Are Crossed, The Way Kids Do, For Luck

I am holding out hope that cases will remain relatively few here so we can wonder if it’s all a hoax, this COVID-19 no one has seen or heard of before. No promise of universal testing. We are told to pin our hopes on a vaccine in 2022..? But I worry that here in Hawaii our luck, luck we did not make, will run out.