State not ready for vaccine passport
State also concerned about rising case counts on Maui, Oahu
Technological challenges and rising COVID-19 case numbers on Maui and Oahu remain obstacles for a Hawaii vaccine passport program that would exempt fully vaccinated people from interisland and transPacific travel restrictions, Gov. David Ige said Monday.
“The challenge is that there’s no comprehensive record of those who have been vaccinated in Hawaii,” Ige explained during a news conference on Monday afternoon. “We have been focused on getting shots in arms. We’ve told the providers that they need to report on gross vaccinations provided so that we can report that information back to the federal government, but we did not explicitly require them to enter the vaccination records into the system.”
Creating a vaccination database would also include meeting standards and jurisdictions of each state, and possibly each county, Ige said.
On Friday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention updated its travel guidance to allow people who are completely vaccinated to travel within the U.S. without the need for a pre-travel test or a posttravel quarantine period as long as they continue to take precautions while traveling, like wearing a face mask, practicing good hygiene and staying at least 6 feet away from others.
However, the CDC also advises travelers to follow the restrictions of states and local governments.
Ige said Monday that the state is working on a pilot program with digital application companies CLEAR and CommonPass, which are already being used by a few airlines nationwide to validate negative COVID-19 results before travel, but there’s much more to consider before moving forward.
“We are seeing good results at this point in time and (CommonPass and CLEAR) have committed to incorporating vaccination data and status into platforms when it becomes available, so we feel pretty good about where we are,” Ige said.