HiPHI's COVID-19 Public Health Action Webinar: Utilizing Data to Drive Re-Opening Decisions
On October 14, 2020, Hawaii Data Collaborative’s Executive Director, Nick Redding, joined the Hawaii Public Health Institute (HiPHI) and other panelists to discuss how COVID-19 data is informing the City and County of Honolulu’s (C&CH) re-opening strategy, tier system, and other related policy decisions. Some of the main points Nick highlighted were:
The Hawaii Data Collaborative’s mission to elevate critical data to address Hawaii’s most pressing challenges;
How the coronavirus pandemic amplified the urgency of that mission;
The questions and problems that emerged as a result of the coronavirus, and some of the ways the Hawaii Data Collaborative has been working to address them, including transforming the Hawaii State Department of Health’s (DOH) COVID-19 data into easy-to-digest dashboards, partnering with a group of subject area experts and academics known as the Hawaii Pandemic Applied Modeling work group (HiPAM) to elevate their insights to those whose decisions will impact the well-being of our state, and partnering with the Hawaii COVID Collaborative to launch COVID Pau, which aims to synthesize and translate reliable data and information and empower Hawaii residents in the public health decisions we’re faced with daily.
Moderating the discussion was Stephanie Moir, from the HiPHI team; other panelists included Dr. Mitchel Rosenfeld, Program Manager with the City and County of Honolulu, and Hirokazu Toiya, Director of the City and County of Honolulu’s Department of Emergency Management. Some of the main points Hiro and Mitch touched on are the C&CH’s efforts to provide the public transparent information with its four-tiered reopening strategy, the significant efforts and investments made to support DOH’s testing and contact tracing capabilities, as well as the C&CH’s quarantine and isolation capacities, and the partnership that continues to develop between the DOH and C&CH as a result of their coordinated efforts in developing a re-opening strategy.
