Disney yet to announce reopening plan, but industry and analysts are watching

Yeah, that's something I asked somewhere along the way.

How much does health care actually improve a COVID-19 situation vs simply house the sick and/or dying?

hambone said:
RideMan, I'm not sure where your data on Marion Correctional is from. The Marion Star yesterday reported a total of 7 prisoner deaths at Marion; 30 statewide. All the ones who have been identified, as far as I have seen, have been aged 60 and up.

My data was from the Dispatch article back when the news first broke. I learned today that there have actually been 8 inmate deaths at Marion and I believe one employee. Good catch; I was actually intending to come on here and make that update today.

I am watching the numbers the State is publishing every day, and when I saw a spike in the case numbers I investigated briefly and noticed it was entirely explained by the corrections testing. There is another, smaller spike going on now, and again I think they are testing everybody who lives in communal housing, particularly nursing homes. But I am not following the details closely; I have far too much work to do of my own.

I do wonder, though...the nursing homes were the first facilities to be sealed off, and yet the virus managed to get in and take root. Does that tell us anything about our mitigation efforts? Please note, that is NOT a rhetorical question.

--Dave Althoff, Jr.

Gonch and Andy, it's a good question. I think the answer, right now, is probably "it doesn't help very much." The last I saw, the recovery rate for patients on ventilators was in the low single digits.

However, I think the more important question is "what are the doctors learning?" The hospitals aren't merely housing the sick and dying, they're trying treatment strategies and seeing what works. Ventilators, maybe not so much; putting patients on their stomachs seems to help; Remdesivir might help; etc. I don't really know how else they could figure these things out other than bringing in patients and trying different strategies and documenting the successes. And hopefully the answer to "how much does health care help?" gets better over the next several weeks and months. In the short to medium term, I'm much more hopeful that improved treatments will make it more possible to reopen the world, compared to vaccines or herd immunity.

...Because honestly we probably aren't going to get a vaccine for this thing (coronavirus vaccines have a terrible track record) and even if we do, it's going to take far too long for us to try and wait it out.
Quite frankly the most encouraging thing I am seeing (besides the early success of some new treatment options such as Remdisiwhatevertheheckitis) is the discovery that prior infection is more widespread than we previously thought. That's encouraging because of the apparent large number of people who have or have had the virus but are not and have not been seriously ill; in some cases not sick at all. We're learning this through antibody testing and it may well be as simple as people developing antibodies from being exposed to a less-than-infectious (would that be "subcritical"?) dose of the virus. There has been some concern about what level of immunity those antibodies might provide and for how long; my thought is that each exposure would have the effect of increasing the dose required to generate an illness.
So far most of the US has managed to contain the virus enough to keep from saturating the healthcare system. Now that has been accomplished we get to see what happens as we start to ramp up again...and we'll see how much that is moderated by the behavioral changes people have learned over the last few months.

--Dave Althoff, Jr.

I know it doesn't actually mean anything, but I can book Fastpasses for June 1.

Whether it actually is realistic or is able to happen, I truly do believe Disney and Universal are targeting June 1st as their best but also slightly to moderately realistic case scenario for some kind of reopening. Should they? That's a matter of opinion. But based on everything I've heard "through the grapevine" they are shooting for June 1st as the first possible option.

Holiday World is planning to open June 14th. I think that's encouraging for other regional parks, hopefully it works out that additional restrictions can be relaxed throughout the summer.

I think if social distancing guidelines can be relaxed in June/July you'll see the majority of parks do their best to salvage the second half of summer season.

I think that's a big if, and contingent on not seeing a significant second wave of infection.

Huge if...