On Teaching Through a Pandemic: Why Safety Must Come First

By Eric Paul Shaffer — GUEST COLUMN

“They called it paradise. I don’t know why.
You call some place paradise, kiss it goodbye.”
— Glenn Frey and Don Henley, “The Last Resort”

So the Eagles are right. In this fine song, the revelation is clear: we call someplace paradise because no humans are present, and the name attracts populations to a place that was beautiful before their arrival.

Hawai’i is still beautiful, but any motivation to call the place paradise in more than a tourist sense is inaccurate. The current population of Hawai’i is nearly a million and a half, living in 6,422 square miles, about 212 people per square mile. Where most reside, Honolulu, the population density is 5,664 per square mile, a figure which exceeds the population density of many U.S. cities by more than a thousand people per square mile. If paradise is where people ain’t, Hawai’i ain’t a paradise, and Covid-19 has made the vulnerabilities of the islands as clear as the virtues.

Despite that, for a while, Hawai’i was lucky enough to miss much of the Covid-19 pandemic by virtue of its defining geographical characteristic: Hawai’i consists of islands. However, in past weeks, since the loosening of the quarantine restrictions, Hawai’i has…