Shanghai Disneyland will close in effort to contain coronavirus

eightdotthree said:

That seems like a pretty dramatic difference to me.

Then, much like the great moral debate of 2020, we're playing with different rulebooks.

So I briefly glanced at the site and played with things, but what does "safe time" even mean in this context. As we're so apt to point out, it's not like you're totally okay at 46 minutes and then at 48 minutes you're suddenly not. It's a good way for comparing the relative safety of different situations, but I'd still like to understand what the numbers mean in the abstract.

Will the results tell me if I should cancel my cruise?

Not cancelling.

Another potentially weird thing about their modeling.

I thought the point of keeping your gatherings small was to reduce the chance of an infected person being there in the first place. I think the model only assumes 1 infected person in the room so adding more people doesn’t make it more risky does it? If we’re talking about an evening get together I don’t think it would move from person to person in an assembly line.

The more people in the room the closer they will all be to each other in general so the closer the infected person is likely to be to the potential infectee. That's my guess anyway.

I drive transit in Denver. I can tell you there are a whole lot of people that can't be bothered to wear masks out there. I can't even count the number of people that will get on a bus with a mask and sit down and proceed to lower it below the chin or at least expose their nose. People of all ages. And these are people sitting in a 40 foot long vehicle with strangers. Who knows where they've been?

Our free shuttle has some of the worst maskless offenders. I think it may be that the homeless crowd has less access and they still ride anyway. And we aren't supposed to enforce it anyway, just play the canned message. So either we risk assault requesting compliance or we risk illness. Lose. Lose.

I think my main point is that mask use is decent out there, but there still is a way to go. And it seems a lot of people don't care or can't be bothered even as we move into the severe category. Even the freakin' mayor told everyone to stay home and then got on a plane and traveled out of state. Pandemicing is hard.

I think any anecdote from someone not living in a primarily rural or minority community isn't seeing how poorly things are going in those places. It's not the well-off city folk or those of us among the McMansions that are seeing the outbreaks right now. That's not intended to be political, that's just objectively where things are worst right now.

Ask the Denver Broncos how important wearing a mask is.

ApolloAndy said:

So I briefly glanced at the site and played with things, but what does "safe time" even mean in this context. It's a good way for comparing the relative safety of different situations, but I'd still like to understand what the numbers mean in the abstract.

Yeah, same. My simple mind likes to read it as plainly as risk expressed as time. Less time = higher risk.

However, the preprint includes this:

We here define an analogous reproductive number for indoor, airborne transmission, ℛin(τ), as the expected number of transmissions in a room of total occupancy N over a time τ from a single infected person entering at t = 0.

Our safety guideline sets a small tolerance ϵ for the indoor reproductive number, defined as

One may interpret ℛin(τ) as the probability of the first transmission, a probability that can be expressed as the sum of N −1 independent transmission probabilities to each susceptible person in a well-mixed room.

So is the time expressed the expected time it would take for the first transmission to take place under the set variables? Or am I way off?

Either way, like I said, not gospel. Just another potential source of insight. I liked how I could change variables and see the results of those changes pretty easily.

I would think, as a math lay-person of the highest power, they mean the time before transmission could reasonably take place amongst anyone in the room in general. You have so much floor space....a certain level of crowding...and a certain array of human behaviors taking place.

My neighbor two doors down just let us know that he and wife both tested positive. Scary because he is a cancer survivor and recent recipient of chemo. His dad recently had a stroke, so they went down to visit him and the family had a dinner at someone's house. Turns out one person (his sister) was positive but didn't know it. Out of 12 other people at that dinner, 7 ended up positive as far as they know.

This is interesting, as I finally got it to work and it more or less aligns with the protocols we had here at Mount Union for teaching live back in August. The room population limits were set on square footage of the classrooms, and when I plug in the parameters for my classes, it's almost exactly what we had set.

Here is an interesting article from the WSJ about how early COVID-19 might have been here. You may need a subscription to read the full thing (it popped up on my phone's news feed, but I can't read it on a PC).

I realize this doesn't negate procedural or policy failures, but this would certainly be a significant find. It's hard to say what all the implications would be.

I know two people who got Covid but none of the members of their respective households got it. Then there are the people (like the family noted above) where one person in the family infects multiple family members during a gathering that lasts a couple of hours. Others didn't infect people that live in the same house 24/7. Part presumably based on activities (some families are loud talkers) and how contagious a given case is and part based on immune systems (some people always seem to get multiple colds each year and/or the flu (even with a flu shot) and other people do not get sick (even without a flu shot). But you just don't know where you fall on that spectrum which creates a big challenge.

GoBucks89 said:

I know two people who got Covid but none of the members of their respective households got it.

I know a couple where she got it really early on in March. They slept in the same bed, she moved to another room when symptoms got bad, but didn't really isolate. Her husband never got it and has been tested multiple times. She's been a long-hauler and is still managing some lung damage. Not balking at models or any info we know, but it's so odd how random it is with different people.

Hong Kong Disneyland closes again

https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2020/11/30/half-of-disney-theme-parks-shuttered-worldwide-as-hong-kong-disneyland-closes-again/

Saw this tidbit today...

A study by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington estimated that 130,000 lives could be saved by February if mask use became universal in the United States immediately. Masks can also preserve the economy: A study by Goldman Sachs estimated that universal use would save $1 trillion that may be lost to business shutdowns and medical bills.

I wonder if the above assumes everyone at all times is wearing a mask. Or is mask wearing limited to only non-eating, public settings, e.g. walking around a store or sitting on a bus?

Playing off of Gonch's mask idea, it seems we need a bit more definition in what "mask use became universal" means.

I'm currently in line for Haunted Mansion at Magic Kingdom and have been at the park since about 9:30. A few thoughts:

Mask wearing and distance following is taking place at a 99% success rate. To Gonch's points, is the 1% where someone creeps up too close to me in a queue for 30 seconds or a few (mainly men 40+) people wandering the park wearing their masks a chin strap really affecting my safety at all? I'd say no, and that's why I feel it's an acceptable risk to come to a theme park despite the explosion of cases nationwide.

To counter that point though, these are the people that aren't (likely) practicing any mitigation in their personal lives and doing the risky big gatherings and doing the mask free thing where they can. They aren't a danger to me here because any legit exposure time can be measured in seconds. But when they gather with other likeminded individuals it can be trouble.

I'm still pro mask/reduced capacity mandates while being super anti-shutdown. Reclosing theme parks, restaurants, etc seems counterproductive at this point.

Outside of COVID, when the temps hover in the low 50s, tourists still wear shorts and locals still wear heavy winter coats with hats gloves and I overheard a group of Cast Members talking about how they needed to find the hand warmers in the break room.

And without Fastpass+ the line for Peter Pan is 30 minutes at 11am. And that's with Seven Dwarfs down mechanical since the park opened. Astro Orbiter is a walk on. Space Mountain took 15 minutes at 10:30.

That's the bigger problem: Magic Kingdom isn't the bus that J. is driving in Denver, and it's not the biker rally in Sturgis. It's not even, to your point, the unmitigated home gatherings. The governor of California is unwilling to make that distinction, which is hardly surprising since a significant portion of the population doesn't get it either. The arguments about "it's only a problem if..." aren't helpful when that population won't accept the "if" in the first place.

There is also still a surprising amount of butthurt (callback to the before times) on social media with people still furious the parks are open and feel they should be closed indefinitely and also paying everyone fully.

Also you've gotta be freezing your tits off at Magic Kingdom today. 😁