A Missing Piece to Hawaii’s COVID-19 Response: The Hawaii Pandemic Applied Modeling Work Group
by Adriann Gin, Hawaii Data Collaborative
Hawaii is watching closely as our state’s leaders implement policy to slowly reopen with a phased approach. How are these decisions being made, though? And what data are they rooted in?
As the Hawaii Data Collaborative, collaboration is inherent in our name and mission – that is, to build capacity in individual stakeholders, and encourage platforms for working together. There is no greater need for this than the present, as we face a problem of a scale we have never seen before.
One of the highest priority questions Hawaii’s economic recovery plan must address is when, and under what conditions, should Governor Ige lift the mandatory 14-day quarantine for all individuals arriving or returning to Hawaii. We have been working to refine our Hawaii Synthetic Population Model to address this question, and we recognize we can’t do it alone. We have been collaborating with local experts of varying backgrounds to repeatedly challenge and improve the model, which we believe will help Hawaii decision makers better navigate our “new normal.”
This group of local experts is no ordinary hui. Known as the Hawaii Pandemic Applied Modeling (HiPAM) Work Group, the group originally formed out of a collective concern that our state’s decision makers lacked a Hawaii-specific, data-driven modeling tool to inform their decisions in response to COVID-19. Although it originally comprised primarily of academics and faculty from the University of Hawaii at Manoa, HiPAM has grown to include representatives from the Hawaii Department of Health, major local hospitals, and community nonprofits focused on Hawaii health and well-being.
As you might expect, individual members of HiPAM – all of whom are volunteering their time – include health care workers, biological science researchers, and epidemiologists. But it also counts among its members experts from astronomy to urban planning, from computer scientists to social workers. The group’s diversity is one of its strengths, and both reflects and begins to address the far-reaching ripple effects of the pandemic. The collective brain power of HiPAM is tremendous, and provides the level of real-world scrutiny, conceptual rigor, and varied knowledge needed to make any COVID-19 model as strong as possible.
As we noted previously, a robust model grounded in local data is critical to senior officials and executives understanding the impacts of COVID-19 in Hawaii. Such a model will be invaluable for decisions as complex as reopening the state’s economy. And while local business leaders and industry-specific experts already have seats at the table, groups like HiPAM deserve space as well, to bring greater technical expertise to bear on COVID-19 decision making. To face the unprecedented problems that the pandemic has brought to our islands, we need new approaches as well as extraordinary levels of collaboration. HiPAM is ready and willing to contribute to that effort, and its expertise may just be the missing ingredient that Hawaii decision makers need in the mix.
