In December 2019, Chinese health authorities had closely monitored the cluster of pneumonia caused by the “severe acute respiratory syndrome–coronavirus 2” (SARS-CoV-2) and treated the patient cluster. After the first death on January 11, 2020, as of September 24, 2020, the number of cumulative confirmed cases of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) exceeded 32M globally, the 6.97M U.S., and 11K in Hawai’i state. Moreover, the cumulative confirmed deaths are 979K globally, 202K in the U.S. and 121 in Hawaii. Passing 2020 summer, the state of Hawaii experiences drastic increases in both the confirmed cases and deaths. However, forecasting and modeling of COVID-19 trends turned out to be challenging for various reasons. This study provides a brief summary and comparative analysis of the pandemic progress in Hawai’i state from January to September 2020 to better understand the COVID-19 past and future. Our modeling study was conducted under the 2020 summer program of the Native Hawaiian Science and Engineering Mentorship Program (NHSEMP) and is currently on-going.
Dr. Albert Kim is a Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa with areas of specialty and research interest that include Environmental Soft Matter Physics: Theory and Simulations, Computational Environmental Engineering, Member Separation Processes, and Hydrodynamics of Colloids and Nanoparticles. Dr. Kim received a Ph.D. in Civil and Environmental Engineering from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2000, is an awardee of the NSF CAREER Award (2005) and a recipient of the University of Hawai‘i Regentʻs Medal for Excellence in Research (2006) and Teaching (2017).