Let the kids swim
While I understand the pressure Mayor Mitch Roth is under to make the best decisions for the greatest amount of people, youth swim programs should be allowed full access of state/public facilities.
Pools are naturally wide-open areas, swimmers are naturally distanced from each other at all times, and the water acts as a natural disinfectant because of standard water treatments needed to keep it clean. Even coaching and pool staff maintain a natural distance from the athletes and each other. Practices were even thinned down to allowing only athletes, making them even safer due to parents not being able to congregate.
Only two other alternatives exist:
1. Ocean-swim, which carry with it exponentially higher risks due to currents, wildlife, weather or even pollution (like at Kailua Bay last year.)
2. Private lessons, which can be (and is) perceived as only catering to “elites” or people lucky enough to be blessed with home pools, leaving out the vast majority of these athletes.
With very few exceptions, you are hard-pressed to find another sport with natural safety conditions and staff that are as dedicated to fighting for the safety of their athletes. By not allowing this niche of athletes the use of their designated facilities, you’re creating a situation that will have dire effects for all of these athletes’ futures, up to and including college scholarships and representing our country in the Olympics.
Mayor Roth, please, along with hundreds of other parents, I am begging you to detach yourself from your current mindset, take a hard look at this section of your battlefield on COVID-19 and make the right call. Let these kids swim and give everyone some much needed hope in a world where it’s becoming increasingly harder to find.
Nick Posey
Kailua-Kona
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‘All I care about is me’
Isn’t it ironic that people who are so insistent on saving their rights to exhibit risky behavior to the rest of us are sending us back to the very conditions they have been protesting? They don’t want to wear masks, they don’t want to get vaccinated. And yet because of these menaces to society, our hospitals are overwhelmed, our community is regressing to mask mandates, closed beaches and parks and smaller social groups. Now there is talk of locking down for a month. All to protect a “freedom” and that does not exist.
We have never had the option of driving drunk, for instance. Why? Because drunk driving poses a menace to society. The idea that you should be able to get wasted and drive a car because it’s your right to do so is just foreign to our sensibility. Yet, somehow folks seem to feel it’s their “right” to infect others without their consent and fill the hospitals so that people who are having strokes and heart attacks get either delayed or sent elsewhere.
In the world wars we had a common enemy and we all pulled together for the common good. Now that spirit has been replaced with something more akin to “All I care about is me.”
Geoffrey Stafford
Keauhou
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Go a step further
The governor tells people not to come to Hawaii, then tell the airlines not to sell tickets so cheap.
Gerry Kahulamu
Keauhou
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