Shanghai Disneyland will close in effort to contain coronavirus

He can't get a law passed but he can start the misinformation and cause trouble for sure.

This article is the stuff I find annoying. Sure, the executives could cut their pay a bit, but to save 28,000 employees? Seriously? The state government mandated the closures. You can’t blame the businesses for that, especially when it has been nearly seven months at this point.

I’m just saddened. Saddened for so many employees to be out of jobs they loved, many of whom were barely scraping by financially. I’m also frustrated at how simple people think the decision-making process is for our leaders. I’m willing to accept that there are screw-ups, but I think there’s often a fundamental lack of understanding of the difficulty of deciding where you draw a line. I realize that aggressive steps need to be taken to keep COVID-19’s spread at bay, but even the countries we once (and often still do) praised are still struggling and seeing spikes. It’s also not the only thing that can kill you. Running out of money and losing insurance can do that as well, and there’s only so much the government could ever do even if health insurance wasn’t the problem it is in the USA. There’s no such thing as infinite money.

As much as some here criticized the slider concept, I think it’s becoming very clear that that’s our reality, and I think that it’s too early to declare who all the winners and losers are in the decision-making process. California may have been and may still be more aggressive than Florida in the shutdowns, but 3x as many people at a CA resort not even half the size of its FL counterpart lost their income and insurance. Who is to say what that might do to the lives of some of those people as well?

I assure you I am not trying to be at all callous. The priority should absolutely be fighting COVID-19 as aggressively as possible, but I think that Walt Disney World and Universal, along with numerous regional parks, operating without causing outbreaks shows that some of these other measures are very probably excessive to a fault.

I think most of us here agree that California not letting the parks open is a huge mistake. There is no science that validates that a park, with the mitigation protocols in place, is the source of a spreading event.

I also don't like the war on executives being used as a scapegoat, because you're right, the CEO salary isn't going to offset 28k layoffs.

On my trip out to get food yesterday afternoon, I'm pretty convinced we're ****ed in the next few months, at least, here in Florida. Observing people in a retail/restaurant area on 192, you'd think it was a year ago. Little mask wearing at all. I watched unmasked people stream into a barcade with no masks.

I know this ship has sailed, but the slider didn't have to be a one dimensional slider. If we had a quick and scientifically based (i.e. not politcally motivated) response we could have reduced both the impact of the virus and the economic hardship.

But given where we are now, I don't necessarily oppose reopening theme parks, but I also can't blame the CA government for not doing so. I mean, none of us have access to the same data or expertise and absence of evidence in Florida is not evidence of absence. It can't be good for your corona virus numbers to have hundreds of thousands of people travelling from around the country to stand in a fairly tight space, even if it is outdoors, masked, and distanced.

ApolloAndy said:

I mean, none of us have access to the same data or expertise and absence of evidence in Florida is not evidence of absence. It can't be good for your corona virus numbers to have hundreds of thousands of people travelling from around the country to stand in a fairly tight space, even if it is outdoors, masked, and distanced.

Regarding the first sentence you used, that applies to the states that have been more aggressive in reopening as much as it applies to those that have been stricter. California and Florida had two very different approaches and both had nasty spreads a couple months back, but Florida got disproportionately blasted. Whether intentional or not, it comes off as selective criticism. It just seems like we bestow praise on the stricter states and criticize the more aggressive ones, even though both have their problems.

Taking things internationally, and again I'm using the IHME model for this, countries like Germany, France, and Italy are seeing spikes again, and yet we don't say much. According to that same IHME model, Germany also has lower mask usage than Florida (so do California and New York, for that matter). Germany seems to be one of the darlings on here as far as how successful their response has been determined to be, but yet they have lower mask usage and their cases are climbing while Florida's aren't? It's things like this that are why it gets really hard to listen to people on what we should and shouldn't be doing, because where the criticism goes doesn't always jive with the data. It just really feels like people, on all sides, overlook certain inconvenient realities, and it's exceptionally frustrating. It just makes this whole process that much more miserable, and I feel like perception holds far too much weight in decision-making. This isn't a game. This is the most significant challenge most of us will ever likely face in our lifetimes and the disunity at all levels is astounding.

I get that there are plenty of reports about how the state of Florida didn't always handle things above board. I'm certain we could have fared a bit better, but based on what I see elsewhere, I'd take my current reality over probably every alternative elsewhere in the country. Mind you, I add the caveat that I'd taken Sweden's or New Zealand's realities over anywhere else in the US, but it's too late for that.

As to your second sentence, you would think so, but as we've just said, there's been no evidence yet that any outbreaks originated at major parks. I get your point that absence of evidence does not equal evidence of absence, but for California to apparently be putting no priority on getting things like its parks open (I think Bob Iger would have stayed on that commission if there were) seems to make very little sense.

I will absolutely grant you that there was likely a better national response that could have been done, and I wish we had had someone at the very top who would have exhibited better leadership, or at the very least been more honest about our objectives here. I do think, though, that reality very much did and does involve a slider, and there has to be a degree of balance. I absolutely understand that you can't tip the scales completely in favor of the economy, but tipping them completely in the COVID direction is just as much of a disaster. It's very sobering and I think the only reason I can even utter those words is because I've not known loss in either direction the way countless others have, but unfortunately, every leader is having to make decisions on who they're going to sacrifice and to what extent. Those are decisions I pray I never have to make.

Here is the IHME link as it's been a while: https://covid19.healthdata.org/united-states-of-america/florida?vie...&tab=trend

I'm not selectively saying that one state has data/expertise that we don't or selectively criticizing some states and not others. I'm just saying whether we're criticizing California or Florida or whoever, we should recognize that we're armchair quarterbacking and we don't know everything that's going into these decisions. However, the data we do have has shown that Florida has generally made decisions that favor the economy over the safety of its people.

Case in point: California did has a troublesome rise in cases, but on a per capita basis, it was always less than half of Florida's per capita cases, even during its spike.

Which is certainly a fair statement, but it goes again to my point that if Florida, which the data suggests had a more troublesome go of things, was willing to open its far larger resort whereas California still isn't doing so, California's justification of keeping it closed is at the very least questionable.

Again, it's fine to criticize. I'm pretty sure it's the job of every citizen to hold her or his government accountable. I just want to make that clear in case I came off a different way. I just think that for all the flak some leaders are getting, I do think there could be a method to their madness in a few ways. I realize I have a bit of detachment from the health side of COVID-19 as I've not known anyone personally who has passed, so certain things are easier for me to say than they might be for others. That said, given my industry, Florida's approach has been a lot more favorable to my continued employment, at least for now, than a lot of alternatives. I just think it's important to note this for the context under which I say what I do. I admit that if I were a lot closer to the health effects of things, I might have a very different outlook.

What you're observing, if anything, somewhat justifies California's response. Florida to date has had 3,336 cases per 100k, California has had 2,112 cases per 100k. Florida has had 50% more cases per capita. Now, do theme parks have anything to do with the case counts? Probably not. There are plenty of examples of bad behavior to attribute that to.

sirloindude said:

if Florida, which the data suggests had a more troublesome go of things, was willing to open its far larger resort whereas California still isn't doing so, California's justification of keeping it closed is at the very least questionable.

From my Monday morning armchair, I think you have the causality backwards. Florida has had a more troublesome go of things BECAUSE it's willing to open it's far larger resort (and malls and bars and beaches and dry humping, etc.).

Okay, put me in coach…

Bad behavior is only part of it. It’s the measurable, but there is an immeasurable climate factor that is really pulling the strings. I really believe seasonal climates affecting the way humans spend time are being undervalued as a factor for case trends. When I see these location X vs. location Y arguments like the above that are in two climates, I kind of laugh. Especially now with data coursed over six months of changing seasonal (and yes cultural) situations.

Maybe you want to under report on external factors because you want people to try as hard as they possibly can. Hope is a strategy?

Northern Europe like the northeast is getting colder. And not surprisingly cases are rising. Us northeasterners are still being diligent, and our cases are rising.

Meanwhile Florida is out of “swamp ass season”. Cases in the south were spiking in humid July not now to a point because people are moving more outside and the windows are open. Masks are the micro factor of mitigation. And the only one we can control so therefore hella important! But how people interact within and because of their climate is a macro factor and immeasurable multiplier.

Feels like temperatures in the Miami area are in the 90s. (95 outside my window). Swamp Ass season continues. Now, Trump said the heat was going to kill the virus so maybe that is a good thing? Hell, I don't know. I just know I rant this morning, showered, and was still sweating an hour later.

We're still at least a month away from even thinking about turning the A/C off and opening the windows here in Orlando. Then again, I'm one of those crazies that has the A/C set to a comfortable 68 degrees cost be damned. I don't like sweating at home.

wahoo skipper said:

I just know I rant this morning, showered, and was still sweating an hour later.

That's quite a rant.

We had windows open last week. Actually generated more power from the solar than we used on Wednesday!

One of the problems we have is that in making comparisons, we can do all of the scaling we want (cases per 100k, for instance) but that doesn't change the fact that we are comparing regions which are at different stages of an in-progress epidemic. And it's been that way from the beginning. Ohio preemptively shut down with a whopping 50 active cases (we now have roughly 12k in this state) while New York City was running out of freezer space for the victims.

I'm not sure I am ready to condemn Florida's recent actions. I don't live down there, so I don't know what's really going on. But there is growing evidence that shutting down the economy isn't keeping people from getting sick, but it's killing people and businesses in other ways, and in some ways it's merely delaying the inevitable progress of the epidemic. Maybe Florida is showing us an exit strategy, as removing the restrictions doesn't automatically put things back to "normal". I realize it's Florida, but has the dry-humping really returned to 2019 levels just because the Governor says the bars can open at full capacity? I have to think what's really happened isn't so much to get the State back to normal, but rather to make it no longer a State decision whether to do so. Let citizens and businesses decide based on their own risk tolerance when and how to get back to whatever 'normal' is going to look like now.

I'm not in any position to say whether the approach is right or wrong; in fact I don't think anyone is. We just get to watch the experiment play out. We get to watch all 50 experiments play out.

--Dave Althoff, Jr.

There are no stages at this point... we're in cycles.

No one is saying anything about shutting down any economies. Why does that even keep coming up? I feel like we keep going over this again and again, that you can operate the world and most kinds of businesses that don't rely heavily on face-to-face contact in a manner that is relatively (but not perfectly) safe, assuming people play along.

The weird thing is that as much as I believe that, it's probably not a coincidence that Florida's case and death counts started to rise when phase 2 opening started at the beginning of June. Our case and death counts are still three times higher than they were in June, so take that for whatever it's worth. Should be interesting now that basically there are no restrictions. Anecdotally this week, I haven't seen anything good happening.

RideMan said:

I realize it's Florida, but has the dry-humping really returned to 2019 levels just because the Governor says the bars can open at full capacity

Based on what I see when I leave work in Downtown Orlando, honestly, yes. Every night this past week I saw dozens of people walking the streets and patronizing the Central Blvd and Orange Ave bars and restaurants with no masks and no distancing taking place.

So last night I held my first public meeting, in person, since March. We took great strides to follow CDC guidelines. I required masks, temperature checks, we spaced people 6 feet from each other and capped the attendance. We had hand sanitizer...it goes on and on. I had people pushing back at me about the face masks and we held our ground.

Can I be 100% sure we were all safe and didn't transmit the virus? No. But, I felt pretty good about our actions. Then I get home and see video of the President, himself inflicted with the virus, ripping off his mask and walking into the White House where his handlers are all waiting for him.

Does anyone think that makes my job easier? No. And, I will have supporters of the President at my next meeting demanding to be allowed in without a mask because that is what the cool kids do. It is exhausting.

The day after DeSantis said Covid was over we had people coming into the library pushing back on the mask requirement with "but the governor said..." I wish you luck going forward and am glad it went as well as you could have hoped yesterday.

Well, pandemic apathy is definitely not just an American phenomenon.

‘Pandemic fatigue’ affects parts of Europe as they lock down again, the W.H.O. warns