Shanghai Disneyland will close in effort to contain coronavirus

I really don't envision an alternative.

I mean, back in February and March we all saw what was happening in China, in Italy, in Seattle, in New York City. This thing was downright scary, and looking at the real-world situation now it's kind of easy to forget that. I mean, we had no idea how widespread it really was, or that getting it really *isn't* an automatic death sentence. We didn't know how to treat it at all, and in fact many of the treatments given were ineffective, or worse. We really didn't know anything about it. We didn't even know how it spread, which is why we were so heavily invested in what we now know to be worthless sanitation. We even overestimated how contagious it is, because we didn't understand the mechanism of infection; in some ways we still don't.

I can't really imagine that any other course of action would have been logical, given that we were staring at a high probability of swamping our health care resources in a real nightmare scenario. The one thing I think we could have done would have been to ease off of the restrictions a bit more rapidly, knowing full well that it would result in an increase in case counts, illness, and even death. But given where we are today, we could probably have afforded to get here a bit sooner.

But I think in hindsight, it looks like we probably went too far and generated more collateral damage than was necessary. But I also think there really was no way to know that back in March.

I do think it will be interesting to see what happens in Sweden and in New Zealand in the not too distant future. I'm thinking we're going to find that Sweden (and most of the rest of the world) got it over with, but that New Zealand is likely to see outbreaks (like the one they had last week) over a much longer term. Now that's a prediction, and it really isn't based on much in the way of good evidence, but there you have it, and we shall see how I do.

The bigger problem as I see it is that once restrictions and procedures are put into place, it is very difficult to roll them back even when it makes perfect sense to do so. A couple of days ago at the grocery store the entrance attendant *insisted* on spraying disinfectant crap all over my cart handle even though we have known for weeks that is really not at all necessary to battle this virus. But if they stop doing it, there is a segment of their customer base that will insist they aren't doing enough to keep everybody "safe". Sure, that's a minor thing, but it carries over. It's starting to become clear that casual contact isn't really a serious threat; the CDC guidelines are up to a quarter-hour which means that person sliding past you in the grocery store is not likely to get you sick, even ignoring the 99.7546% probability (my estimate for today in Ohio) that he isn't contagious anyway.

Of course most of that I can just chalk up to the fact that most people are really bad at risk analysis anyway.

--Dave Althoff, Jr.

For those of you who are still holding New Zealand out as a model for managing COVID, have a go at this story:

New Zealand has announced it would put all COVID-19 patients into mandatory quarantine camps. The Prime Minister of New Zealand has said that your each and every activity will be monitored in these camps and those that refuse to be tested would be forced to stay in the camps for a longer duration.

Link removed. -J

I removed the link from your post, because it's total bull****. The site you linked to is also leading with, "PROOF: Kamala Harris Ancestor Was Infamous White Slave Owner In Jamaica." This isn't Facebook... you can't post that crap here.

Well since it was posted I had to do some searching. Apparently there are quarantine facilities in NZ but it appears that they are for returning citizens and they are mandatory. Not sure if anything more than that is occurring at this time but there is a small grain of truth in the claims above.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/10/asia/man-escapes-quarantine-new-zealand-intl-scli/index.html

All of this made me think about a problem once explained about flies in the house. Why is it that a fly always manages to enter your house, but then bangs into everything and can never find his way back out. It's a numbers game. If I crack the door with the millions of flies outside, its not that they are particularly good at flying inside, they just eventually do because of the numbers. However, the one that gets in aggravates everyone and can never find his way back out because flies just aren't good at going though small passageways.

It's kind of like NZ and the virus right now. They may have taken case count to zero, but there are a massive load of flies just outside the border and eventually one will slip through an open door or window. In the case of the article above it was a kiwi who was just looking for a beer.

Mandatory quarantines are not that unusual in other countries for those coming in across the border. It's not unprecedented in the US, either. Hawaii has a mandatory 14-day quarantine for anyone arriving on a trans-Pacific flight (including from the mainland) and even some inter-island flights right now. The terms are strict: you are given a one-time-use key to your hotel room, and you are to stay in that room for 14 days, taking delivery of food, etc. until two weeks have passed. There are teeth behind this, and folks who've violated it have been arrested.

At the moment, they are hoping that by October 1 out-of-state visitors can avoid quarantine with proof of a negative PCR test taken within 72 hours of arrival, but that's a moving target---it was originally August 1, then September 1, and just last week was extended to October 1.

As you can imagine, this means that Hawaii tourism has been completely shut down since March. We have a trip planned in December/January, but it is looking increasingly likely that we won't be going. Luckily, we are frequent visitors, so we will get there eventually, but not anytime real soon.

I think Alaska has done something similar, but I think they offer a (paid) test on arrival that can be used to avoid it. I haven't been following AK as closely as HI.

My apologies for whatever happened with the link I posted. I'll make sure and be more careful about that in the future.

Is this now the longest thread in CBuzz history?

Nope, it's this one, but it's second place and closing.

on March 9th, CreditWh0re said:

and just now the entire country of Italy is locked down. The Entire country.

Either they are over-reacting or Americans are sorely underinformed.

I guess we know the answer is that Americans are underinformed, and worse, once given the correct information, would blatantly refuse to follow the correct guidance. Ugh

I don't have the patience to look, but I suspect we would see a lot of that in the earlier parts of the thread.

I'm not cancelling my cruise!

I keep seeing people seriously say that, among other things, and that is the last place I’d want to be right now. Not because I’m scared of getting sick - but because of the potential problems like being stuck waiting and being denied entry to port because there’s an outbreak, or being forced to remain in our stateroom because of various reasons. The possibility of those things would be in the back of my mind until I was back and off boarded.

Then, there’s the Sardine can that is known as the muster drill... that already causes me anxiety on a good day.

There's no cruise anymore. You had to be here in March.

"Moose out front should have told you."

I see where wahoo skipper started the whole aquatrax thing. I’ve always wondered who to blame.

Raven-Phile said:

but because of the potential problems like being stuck waiting and being denied entry to port because there’s an outbreak, or being forced to remain in our stateroom because of various reasons...

That's why we bailed on our mid-March cruise, which would have been the second-to-last trip the Disney Magic took with passengers. And I know from people who know that there were not any cases on that ship. (From what I hear, the Magic was hit hard, which I think was sailing out of Miami at the time.)

I didn’t know the lemon chill guy cruised with Disney.

He takes what he can get these days.

RCMAC said:

I see where wahoo skipper started the whole aquatrax thing. I’ve always wondered who to blame.

Wait.....what?

By the way, there were over 6,000 crew members aboard the Disney ships. It's not very hard to get an accurate picture of what went down on them. In fact, at the beginning of summer, three were in Port Canaveral together for the first time when they redistributed crews to get them closer to home.