The coronavirus pandemic has disrupted the travel industry, and no travel rules and dates can safely be set in stone as of yet. For people looking forward to traveling to Hawaii anytime soon, there’s good news and there’s bad news. The good news is that according to the Aloha state’s governor, David Ige, visitors can be allowed to travel to the state without a recent coronavirus test or even the need to quarantine, if the visitor can provide a coronavirus vaccine passport. That’ll surely be a good use of a coronavirus vaccine passport. The bad news, it’s currently facing delays.
Hawaii Vaccine Passport Program
Under the Safe Travels Hawai’i program, visitors must either quarantine for ten days or show a negative coronavirus vaccine test before travel. But now there’s hope of bypassing these stressful means. If you happen to have a shiny “vaccine passport” that you can wave at them, then you can proudly waltz into Hawaii. Don’t worry, the usage of the passport is voluntary and you can still enter through the old means, by which we mean the strict coronavirus-era guidelines.
There are measures to be put in place, technology to incorporate, and other things they’ve got to take care of before they can accept the use of the coronavirus vaccine passport. So they’re looking at sometime in summer as a safe time to unveil the new means of travel.
Last Monday, Gov. David Ige announced that the state is working on the best means, or technology, for using the passport with two companies, Clear and CommonPass. It would take them at least a month in order to develop a vaccine database and integrate their system with the state’s. It’s made more challenging by the lack of a federal database to work with, and according to Honolulu Civil Beat, it’s harder for smaller providers to report vaccine data.
The idea of vaccine passports may be emerging in the U.S, but it’s already got opponents and proponents, and a few states including Florida, Nebraska, Utah and Texas, have signed executive orders banning their usage.
The Biden administration has banned the usage of the vaccine passport system, citing the protection of people’s privacy as one of its main reasons for ruling it out.
Hawaii Extends its Moratorium
In April 2020, Hawaii temporarily banned landlords from evicting their tenants for failure to pay rent, maintenance fees, utility bills, taxes and any other required fees. It was supposed to expire on Tuesday, but was recently extended to June 8 during an emergency proclamation in response to the coronavirus pandemic.
Democratic Gov. David Ige signed the proclamation last Friday extending the law that prohibits residential evictions to two more months.
Hawaii has had more than 30,000 confirmed COVID-19 cases since the pandemic first hit last year, and has registered 471 deaths as of Monday.
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