(09-05-2021 09:13 PM)BullsFanInTX Wrote:  Why? Is the outbreak any worse than anywhere else in the country? Everyone else allowed fans. Not to get political, but according to the CDC, this thing spreads much less outdoors.

I understand why folks are curious about this. Here’s the explanation I posted yesterday on the MWC board in response to a similar question:

There’s been a huge Covid outbreak here over the past eight weeks. In early July we were averaging only 50 new cases per day, had over half of the population vaccinated and were opening everything back up. Then the delta variant arrived and our new case counts exploded to over 100 and then over 500 and then over 1,000. There were 888 today, 865 yesterday and 1,068 the day before.

As a result our hospitals are swamped with unvaccinated Covid patients. We ran out of ICU beds today… every single ICU bed in the State of Hawaii is now occupied. There’s an impending shortage of medical oxygen. Despite 72% of the population having at least one vaccination shot and 63% being fully vaccinated, the virus is running rampant through the community. Restrictions are being imposed on everyone because even though the vaccinated folks aren’t getting seriously ill, breakthrough infections are helping spread the disease among the unvaccinated who are.

Hawaii isn’t like everywhere else. We have to play this extra-conservatively because we’re 2,600 miles away from the continent. We have less hospital capacity per capita than most of the country because our population is historically the nation’s healthiest. And when our hospitals are full we don’t have the option of shipping sick people to another state. They just have to wait their turns in tents outside the emergency rooms and hope they don’t die there.

I hate to say it but if we can’t blunt this latest wave of Covid soon we won’t just be denying fans access to games. We’ll be locking down the Islands, canceling games and telling opponents to stay home. I hope like hell it doesn’t come to that, but the stubborn minority of people here who are still refusing vaccination are overwhelming our health care system and we’re running out of alternatives.