Mayor: 11 Cases from August Will Show Up in Today’s Maui COVID-19 Count

By Wendy Osher

Maui will see at least 11 cases added to its COVID-19 cases today, but Mayor Victorino says the cases are two months old and were recently confirmed as linked to the surge at the Roselani Place assisted living facility in Kahului.

“I don’t want everyone to get excited about that, because those cases go back to August. This was some of the Roselani Place cases that were antigen tests that had to be confirmed with PCR (polymerase chain reaction) testing. So over the last couple of months, they’ve done that and now they’re catching up,” said Mayor Victorino in a morning radio interview on KPOA 93.5 FM with Shane Kahalehau.

“These are cases that we knew about and I thought that during the month of August, which was a high month… I had believed that these had all been counted in, but they were not,” said Mayor Victorino.  “It’s important people hear it from me and understand why this number will come up today.  In fact, we still are doing very well.  If you take out the 11, we’d probably have zero again today–but that’s okay.  We’ll take whatever comes.”

“I believe the state Department of Health is starting to get more accurate and caught up with all these cases.  So we may have a few more of these days, where we have 3, 4 or 5 that really relate back to the spread during the month of August and early September,” said Mayor Victorino.

Today’s official case count will be updated at around noon when the state Department of Health releases its updated data.

Maui has had four consecutive days of no new cases.  Prior to that, Maui’s daily case count ranged from 0-3 since mid September.  As of Monday, Maui County’s percent positivity rate was 0.1% (-0.1).

Clusters on Maui earlier this year were confirmed at the Roselani Place assisted living facility and the Maui Memorial Medical Center.  Other cases have occurred at: the Maui Police Department; a Lahaina bar; at the Prosecutor’s Office in the Old Maui Courthouse; one at the Molokaʻi Baseyard; and at the Judiciary at Hoapili Hale in Wailuku.