Getting Covid-19 Tested for Hawaii

Nothing caused me more anxiety about this trip than worrying about getting the results for the Covid-19 tests in time to avoid the 14-day quarantine that Hawaii has in effect. If you have to obey the quarantine order, it means you can’t rent a car or a house. You can only go to an approved hotel and not leave your room for 14 days.

I’m hoping that my month of anxiety will only cause you three days, or 72 hours, of anxiety — there’s no avoiding it. Until you have the negative results PDF from a Hawaii Safe Travels trusted provider, you will be on pins and needles. There are three key takeaways about planning: airport, date of flight, and whether you are flying with kids. My family was in the worst possible position. Flying out of San Jose early on Wednesday morning with three kids and grandma in tow.

Before you book a flight, know what your testing plan is. Does your airport offer rapid point of care testing? In the Bay Area, both San Francisco and Oakland do. However, are you guaranteed to have a testing slot? In the midst of my panic, I made a separate reservation at Oakland Airport. However, on the day of my flight, I checked for testing availability, and I received this message.

What if I had been depending on that test? Because United out of SFO is typically so much more expensive, I didn’t look at the Color testing and whether that was guaranteed with a reservation. I am hoping that sometime in the near future SJC will also have an option. One of the Alaska partners, Carbon Health mentions on their website that they plan to open up pop-up services in the future.

So, why does the day of the flight matter? The 72-hour window is the tricky part. If you are leaving on a Wednesday then your 72-hour window starts on a Sunday, when labs are closed and UPS isn’t shipping. I explored all of us driving up to a clinic in San Francisco where I could get appointments for everyone, but that was more than effort than I wanted to put out and my six-year-old daughter was freaking out about the nose swipe. After spending a day in a panic attack and thinking about calling off the trip, I realized that we didn’t all have to get tested together. There’s was a very viable telehealth option called Vault. The kids could do telehealth, and the adults could go to CVS.