Disney and Universal drop indoor mask requirement for vaccinated guests in US parks

So what is the appropriate amount of lead time on a change like this? And does the same timeframe apply to other mask requirements - like citywide ones?

168.125 hours. Adjusted (but only upward) for the population density of your staff and customers compared to averages for your county and decreased based on height and number of plexiglass shields on your location.

Always need to budget more for governments. Minimum 43.72% increase.

I still have my indoor mask requirement in place. I have tried to follow the CDC guidance from the outset so as to not let it appear to be, or become, political decision making. That has served me well to date but as soon as I make an independent decision outside of the CDC guidance I will lose the scientific argument from here on out.

The problem right now is the CDC guidance, currently, is a bit vague. They are still recommending masks indoors in areas of high transmission...but they don't quantify what that is. Going back to the early information that was released under Trump I believe that to be <5% over over a rolling, 3-day average. We aren't there yet in my county.

It sounds like the CDC is working on new guidance and I assume it will be issued for implementation in March. With that I'm prepping my folks now. I have staff all over the place with their comfort level on this. Some never wanted masks, some never want to give them up. Communicating as often as possible at least helps prep expectations, in my opinion.

I've got no objection to private entities moving quicker than this if they are making those decisions with some type of criteria in mind. Went to Disney several times during the pandemic. Sometimes wore masks indoors and outdoors, sometimes indoors only. The masks never detracted from my experience.

There's still not a single state in the US that's below high transmission... The CDC data tracker isn't very fast or maybe isn't working but Covid Act Now displays the data in a really clean and easy to understand way.

Lord Gonchar said:

Basically, you have to meet all of the following criteria:

1. Still worried about maskless transmission from others
2. Booked long enough ago that plans are set
3. Arriving within a timeframe that is post-change, but still makes changing those plans impossible

I have no idea how common #1 is (and I live in one of the most conservative counties, virus wise, so my anecdotal evidence is totally shot). But I bet #2 is relatively high given that we're talking about Disney World and not Target. Cancellation is 7 days for hotels, 30 days for packages, and infinity days for tickets (though they can be used on future dates), so #3 is basically "everyone at WDW this week" and "some chunk of people" for the next 30 days. I'm not at all suggesting they give 30 day lead time for this change, but at least some flexibility for cancellation deadlines is in order.

And don't get me wrong, I also think this goes the other way as well. In July 2021, we left the DL resort 12 hours before mask requirement returns were announced for Delta which was 12 hours before the gates opened. I would be equally "miffed" if I had booked and travelled to DL expecting to be mask free and didn't check the news and found out at the gate the next morning.

RideMan said:

So vaccination doesn't matter... We also know (actually have always known) that masks are also not very effective.

Neither of these statements are true, especially if you're tying it to the anecdote that you got sick and were hospitalized. There is a massive pool of data that shows vaccination and masks do change outcomes dramatically. Neither is perfect, and no one ever suggested otherwise.

Again, our current state is that the population at large has a fair amount of immunity between vaccination and prior infection, and together with a variant that causes less disease and appears to be burning itself out quickly, it's not likely that you're actually mitigating exposure with masks. This is a materially different scenario from a year ago, when almost no one under the age of 65 was vaccinated and previous variants caused far more serious disease.

RideMan said:

We also know (actually have always known) that masks are also not very effective.

--Dave Althoff, Jr.

Masks are only ineffective if they aren't worn properly. If you are responsible with your mask wearing, they can help (albeit not perfectly) stop transmission of the virus.

This is what I get for composing posts when I am supposed to be working, I guess...

Context is everything.

The issue was that everyone would of course be honest about vaccination status. My response to that is that unvaccinated people can be expected to lie unashamedly and bare faced about it. But *in this context* vaccination doesn't matter. We know that there is now a related virus going around (trust me, I'm pretty sure it's the one I got, although I wasn't sequenced) that laughs at immunization. As a means of insuring that a given individual is not carrying a contagious virus, immunization status is about as useful as a temperature check.

I'm not saying vaccination doesn't matter...it does, and if you want anecdotes, Jeff and his wife didn't get sick caring for their kid; and mine probably kept me off a ventilator, possibly even kept me alive. In terms of individual outcomes, it makes a huge difference. In the context of who should or shouldn't take specific precautions when visiting a resort, though, it really doesn't matter at this point. If you want to minimize the chance of one of these viruses doing Bad Things to you, get your shot. If you want to minimize the chance of any given person bringing one of these viruses into your facility, it's a total crap shoot.

The mask issue is similar. If you put a mask on a contagious person and put that person in close contact with other people, it might do a little good. It's less useful in keeping a healthy person healthy, and if it's cloth, the CDC says it's basically useless*. But again, using Ohio numbers because they're the ones I have handy, a pessimistic estimate is that the prevalence of potentially contagious people today is 0.5372%, or 1:186. Mask requirements aren't about keeping you from getting sick, they're about keeping you from making someone else sick. And statistically that's totally unnecessary for more than 99.56% of the population, probably a higher percentage in the resort than in the rest of the world: 1:186 is across the entire population, but there is no reason to expect an even distribution. Add to that other natural mitigations and...I like Jeff's language here..."it's not likely that you're actually mitigating exposure with masks." No. There simply isn't that much exposure in the first place, and everyone can protect himself through a variety of methods including masks, respirators, vaccinations, previous exposures, talismans, faith healing, and nearly any other method you can think of so long as it doesn't impinge on anyone else.

I'm not trying to get into the face-covering effectiveness holy war here, but I do want to point out that regardless of effectiveness in situations where such a mitigation might be useful, Disney and Universal have clearly decided that the risk involved in their respective businesses does not warrant this particular form of mitigation, and that there is a statistical justification for this position. A justification based not on a judgement of the effectiveness (or lack thereof) of the mitigation, but based on the prevalence of the risk.

--Dave Althoff, Jr.

* https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7106e1.htm . The easiest summary is to look at the big graphic on the page and note that even in a study that appears to employ cherry-picked data, the impact of the cloth mask is disclaimed as "not statistically significant." That a 56% figure is not statistically significant kind of dampens the other results as well, in my opinion.

--DCAjr

Lord Gonchar said:

Regardless of how "done" it really is or isn't, it's done.

I think this is an honest perspective.

Even if there is another wave, I would predict nothing short of apathy. By this I don't mean those that are already vaxxed doing nothing (I think that the majority will continue to get whatever is recommended), but rather a collective societal yawn in terms of reinstating guidelines.

It's not a question of how hard it would be to put the genie back in the bottle; it's simply not going back in.

The genie has been freed.

I think that’s why we are seeing such reluctance among some to drop some of the few remaining requirements and restrictions: once gone, they’re not coming back. Attempts to reinstate anything will be met with varying degrees of resistance and noncompliance.

—Dave Althoff, Jr.

The data thus far suggests an omicron specific vaccine may not offer better results, but boosters are still probably necessary. No one has good answers about the "when" though because waning immunity is still not well understood.

Another gem from Jordan Klepper

I'm not trying to make this the Shanghai thread part deux, but this is likely of interest to everyone that participated there.

CDC Isn't Publishing Large Portions of the COVID-19 Data It Collects

But the C.D.C. has been routinely collecting information since the Covid vaccines were first rolled out last year, according to a federal official familiar with the effort. The agency has been reluctant to make those figures public, the official said, because they might be misinterpreted as the vaccines being ineffective.

Ms. Nordlund confirmed that as one of the reasons. Another reason, she said, is that the data represents only 10 percent of the population of the United States. But the C.D.C. has relied on the same level of sampling to track influenza for years.

Some outside public health experts were stunned to hear that information exists.

“We have been begging for that sort of granularity of data for two years,” said Jessica Malaty Rivera, an epidemiologist and part of the team that ran Covid Tracking Project...

Lord Gonchar said:
I'm not trying to make this the Shanghai thread part deux, but this is likely of interest to everyone that participated there.

That said, I was kind of wondering if Jeff found a problem in POP Forums that causes some kind of a meltdown when a thread exceeds 5,900 entries...

--Dave Althoff, Jr.

No, but because I do rip-and-replace indexing to ElasticSearch, it was having memory issues with the enormous requests to the API.

Shanghai was 5 pages away from being Coasterbuzz’s first Giga-thread.

ApolloAndy said:

Only 294 more pages to go.

I'm just kind of sad Jeff closed it before we reached 300, we were so close, and I'm sure could have gone around the circle once more.

You don't get the service alerts when things don't work.

Maybe the old pentium 3 in the dusty sweaty case running coasterbuzz needs a couple upgrades. :p

I feel like we were only 3 or 4 posts away from forming a consensus and solving this thing, but whatevs.

Consensus is a slider anyway.