HONOLULU — Hawaii’s leaders on Friday urged residents to stay outdoors or at home and avoid people not in their households over the Labor Day weekend to control the spread of COVID-19 as the state battles outbreaks of the highly contagious delta variant.
Maui Mayor Mike Victorino urged people to play cards and video games and watch football.
“There’s plenty of options for us to have a great Labor Day weekend,” Victorino said at a joint news conference with the governor and with the mayors of Kauai, Honolulu and the Big Island.
Officers from the four counties said police would enforce emergency rules limiting crowd sizes over the holiday weekend.
The pleas came as Hawaii’s seven-day average of daily cases hit 867, up 28% from two weeks ago. There were 448 people with COVID-19 in hospitals statewide.
Jill Hoggard Green, the CEO of The Queen’s Health Systems, said physicians and nurses were being creative to manage the influx of sick patients.
But she said if the public doesn’t take steps to control the spread, there may come a time — perhaps in the next month — when they are unable to effectively care for all the new patients as well as caring for their existing patients.
She called this “the worse-case scenario.”
“If we keep it without bringing this down, and it continues to grow, it could happen,” she said.
She urged people who haven’t yet been vaccinated to get inoculated.
“If we all work together today, wear our masks, get our vaccinations, stay safe at home, keep our bubbles tight, we can stop the transmission of the disease,” she said.
Please listen to him so we can Avoid shut down the shopping 🛍 mall is doing a good job