Shanghai Disneyland will close in effort to contain coronavirus

I've said it before and I'll say it again. I'll trade you our DeSantis for your Dewine any day. I'll even throw in a Rubio for no additional charge.

Seriously. Please take Senator Voldemort as well.

DeWine is one of the few governors who acted according to the advice of experts in a consistent way, based on what he was told at any given time. The measure of his success is not whether or not Dave Althoff thinks he's being difficult.

My favorite thing about the pandemic response is that neither end of the political spectrum are not happy with their governor. It's either way too much overreach or not enough. I think Ohio and Pennsylvania got it mostly right.

Good news! The pandemic is over in Florida.

Still waiting for Dave's response on my DeSantis trade offer.

Ha ha ha ha ha. That's outrageous and quite frankly dangerous. Not only will Covid numbers increase — there's really no question about it in my mind — but it's opening up businesses and municipalities that want to provide a safe environment to have to defend themselves and fight with angry customers. If Universal follows this order I am canceling the trip I literally just rebooked.

My guess is this is all about some election happening where Florida is absolutely key to the outcome. And likely, someone is getting leaned on by his good buddy.

The suboptimal thing is that our infection rate is actually on the rise. Florida is now at 1.0, and some counties are already well over that. We're closing on 1.1 in Orange, which is the highest we've seen since the start of July. And to make it more interesting, about half of the kids who were remote for the first quarter are supposed to transition to in-person for the next quarter, even though already two high schools have closed temporarily, and there's a steady stream of new cases in the middles and elementaries.

You ever feel like people do the opposite of what the data says?

Yup.

eightdotthree said:

If Universal follows this order I am canceling the trip I literally just rebooked.

Our status has been moved to tentative as well.

Bars, pubs, and nightclubs that derive more than 50 percent of sales from alcohol should operate at full capacity with limited social distancing protocols.

Sounds like Florida is officially open for dry humping.

As the self admitted "I go do many of the things I did before because there are good precautions in place and it is relatively safe" guy, if places really do go back to 100% occupancy and masks become the minority, I'll be joining Jeff on the social distanced mai tai side of the aisle.

I'm hopeful common sense and science keep most places operating in their current modified normal. I don't see Disney or Universal changing things anytime soon. But I can't say I am rushing off to Fun Spot tonight.

I imagine the parks will not deviate from their current m.o. just because the governor thinks it's over. DPC is opening back up with 1/3 capacity for the ballet, which seems like a pretty terrible experiment since few theaters anywhere have any intention of opening. We have no idea what happens when 500 people gather for two hours in a theater with an intermission in the middle.

Well, I think we can guess.

In the same way that "we had no idea" what would happen when Florida, Texas, and Arizona opened before everyone else.

Is it a weird coincidence that with Ohio and Florida we are dealing with Governor De*? Not sure I have any interest in that trade offer.

I do wish the guidelines would harmonize to the science so we could have our drinking fountains, ketchup bottles and salt shakers back. Ohio is still issuing new guidelines with four pages about wiping down surfaces and the only guidance on ventilation is to find clever new ways to require face masks. Heck, a week ago the State published guidelines for Halloween that encouraged us all to violate Federal law (they did fix that document).
At least our active case count is still generally trending downward. If the current near-linear progression continues we will be done with this in Ohio in mid November. Of course it won’t happen that way, I predict at some point the daily case count curve will go asymptotic*.

—Dave Althoff, Jr.
*Not an autocorrect error.

Some anecdotal, real-world updates from my kids:

At the U, they're now testing every ten days rather than the every 14 days I mentioned before. Not sure if I misunderstood, or they decided to reduce the time between tests. My kid has tested negative on both that he's taken so far and was even able to attend this week's game against FSU. Interestingly, he said the same thing that I mentioned on Facebook about the Chappelle show we went to - the extra space is making the event more enjoyable and if we could pay more to keep this sort of space after we get back to normal, it'd be totally worth it.

The female half of my brood is back in Paris and is reporting that mask use in that area is far below what she saw in the states. (and in the last month she's been in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Phoenix, Denver, Cincinnati, Columbus, and rural Iowa areas).

So much so that while waiting for her ride from the airport, she opted to stand outside in the rain instead of inside with so many unmasked people. So I'm not sure what that means, but I was surprised to hear it. She also tested negative on two COVID tests before flying out.

This has been "Second Hand Info From Gonch's Kids"

Well the pandemic is over here in Orlando. Went out today to get some takeout, watched five people stream into the restaurant with no mask, similar numbers going into the Target that way. Both have signs posted. I suspect this is what's going to happen with the governor lifting restrictions.

Nationally, case counts are up 23% in two weeks. I think people are just getting bored with the pandemic at this point.

Cases are increasing in Europe and there are protests about masks and lockdowns.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/28/world/europe/europe-coronavirus-protests.html

Sweden may have been right in terms of taking an approach that is more sustainable in the longer term. Still need to look at cultural, economic, political, etc differences though.

There's been a lot of talk about cases recently. Talking about cases without any meaningful context is misleading.

In the US, there were between 1.2 and 1.5 million tests reported to the CDC for the 17/18 flu season. There have been a whopping 111 million tests run for COVID in the US (source). Even more telling are the hospitalization numbers, which continue their downward trend. Take a look at the weekly COVID-19-associated hospitalization rates by age group chart on this page (chart is about three-quarters of the way down the page). Currently, less than 2% of the hospitalizations across the US are for CLI (COVID-related illness).

The divergence between case numbers and hospitalizations highlights one important thing - that the vast majority of people are asymptomatic. This is particularly evident in school-aged kids, where a ton of cases have been reported since schools reopened. How many of those kids (or teachers) have been hospitalized as a result of testing positive? Schools have been open a month or more in many locations. If asymptomatic spread was a problem, either to other students, teachers, or to the students families then we would naturally see a rise in hospitalizations. That hasn't materialized, and as a bonus, we know the reason why. Why are we testing so many people who aren't a danger to others?

As of today, this disease has been more deadly than any other disease in the last six months. One million people dead, 200K in the US. Over 7 million cases here, and about 1 in 3 have lingering illness. You can try to rationalize the outcome any way you want, but these aren't good numbers. Maybe you don't know anyone who died, but I do, and it seems unnecessary. Most of all, it's far from over.