Shanghai Disneyland will close in effort to contain coronavirus

There it is: CDC says no masks necessary for the vaccinated. I wonder how the theme parks will react. My suspicion is that they'll start asking for cards and require employees to be vaccinated.

We were just talking about this at work, company follows cdc, but how do we deal with customers who may or may not be vaccinated? Simple, we treat them all as unvaccinated. So no change for us until cdc says no masks period.

Interesting employment-related note for Ohio; starting June 26th the state is stopping $300 in unemployment assistance.

Non-peer-reviewed source for what I just said.

I hear Cedar Point is hiring.

Gotta pay for the tuition and million $ prizes somehow.

I do not like the huge prize idea. Here are some interesting numbers about the $5M...

$5M = 333,333 hours of pay based on $15/hr = 8,333 weeks (40 hr/wk) = 166 yrs of pay

I think they could put that money to something better. They could still do a prize but I think it should have been much smaller.

Unfortunately, I still work in a place full of unvaccinated and unmasked individuals. I am immunized and still wear my mask. Based on those around me, I don't see any of the incentives that different states are offering being enough to really push the needle. It may be the nudge that a percentage of "on the fence" need, but the amount of people that outright reject the notion of getting one is disheartening.

Yesterday Ohio reported 254,289 new and continuing jobless claims. The $5 million in vaccine lottery payments would be about $20 per unemployed person. Over 5 weeks so about $4/person/week.

On the flip side, the extra $300/week amounts to more than $76 million per week. State could conduct 15 of the 5-week vaccine lotteries each week and still have money from the federal money cannons left over.

Ohio's daily first doses are less than 20% what they were at the peak at the end of March. And that is despite significantly increasing the number of people who are eligible in that time.

Unchartered waters right now. I think you do whatever you can to provide incentives to get people vaccinated. Think outside the box. Will it work? Not sure. But you have to try something different than what has ceased to work previously.

One benefit of the lottery is it doesn't incentivize people to wait. Giving free tickets to sporting events for a shot or giving $$ to people who get one now serve to show people that if you wait you will get a reward. That won't be helpful if/when it comes time for boosters.

I like what Dewine said about the idea..."I didn't make this decision thinking everyone was going to like it".

Like GoBucks said, it's thinking outside the box, and sure as hell got people talking. Some of the Facebook comments (I know, I know) even had comments like..."never thought I would say this, but I wish I could move to Ohio!".

Here is a curious case to watch. Hersheypark, as of 2 hours ago, (because of the new CDC guidelines) said masks and social distancing will no longer be required for the fully vaxed.

What they don't say is how this is going to be regulated; that will be the interesting part to watch, as well as the ripple effect these new guidelines will have on parks across the country (if any).

I knew we'd see that from someone, just didn't think it would come that fast. We were talking about the Orlando parks at dinner, and in my estimation they could check cards (I know these can be forged, but how many people really want to be those assholes?), but they would have to announce a start date in advance for checking so people can get the shots or cancel.

Simple answer #1: Don't police it. Know that people will lie about it and take the attitude that it's their business and their problem; if unvaccinated unmasked people are spreading virus, it's only really a problem for the other unvaccinated, unmasked people present. Callus, but ultimately this is where we're going to end up anyway.

Simple answer #2: Check for some proof of vaccination and issue a handstamp or wristband. Parks have been doing that for other purposes for...forever.

Federal health privacy rules prohibit various entities from demanding medical information. But they do not prohibit individuals from voluntarily divulging such information. You can't demand that I tell you if I am immunized, but you may ask, and I may tell you, and I may furnish documentation which, if I show it to you, you're allowed to look at. And if I refuse to divulge that information, there is nothing to stop you from assuming that I am unvaccinated, and therefore treating me accordingly.

--Dave Althoff, Jr.

The way I see it the farther down the numbers go between the combination of vaccination and natural immunity I'm not really concerned about the status of individuals I interact with in general. Statistically speaking the chance that any one of them individually is going to infect me is pretty low at this point. I don't need their medical information revealed to go about my life. The Spanish Flu burned itself out with no vaccinations, this could likely burn itself out with only partial vaccination.

There's a pretty high likelihood that Hershey just lost the business of my family of 5 and 2 friends. I'm not trying to pull a "I'm never going back again because they put a trim on my favorite ride" and we'll almost certainly be back at some point, but none of my kids are twelve and we are going through central PA this summer. We were already researching a trip to Hershey, but I really don't like the idea of just trusting that a bunch of unmasked people in my kids' personal space all told the truth about their vaccination status. Again, it's outdoors and case counts are generally low, so the risk is probably negligible in the first place, but I'd much rather go to a place that I know doesn't have unmasked, unvaccinated people than one where I have to trust that people aren't lying.

RideMan said:

Simple answer #1: Don't police it. Know that people will lie about it and take the attitude that it's their business and their problem; if unvaccinated unmasked people are spreading virus, it's only really a problem for the other unvaccinated, unmasked people present. Callus, but ultimately this is where we're going to end up anyway.

Not exactly. Other unvaccinated masked people still benefit from the liars wearing masks...or being at home. Also, vaccine breakthrough is a real thing. I'm not trying to be Debbie Downer, but I also am seriously considering a trip to Hershey with my unvaccinated kids in early July, so this is what's on my mind.

Andy, I posted this on one of your Facebook posts, but will post it here as well:

Consider that Covid-19 has killed fewer than 450 Americans under the age of 18, which is fewer than a flu season often does. The flu can be deadlier for children than Covid has been, even though most children receive a flu vaccine. While some of the new coronavirus variants may be more severe, the difference is not big enough to change any of the fundamental comparisons. “It’s very unusual for kids to get very sick,” Dr. Rebecca Wurtz of the University of Minnesota said.

The low toll of Covid-19 on children is not just because millions of them have largely stayed at home over the past year and avoided getting the virus. Among those children who have contracted Covid-19, the death rate still looks similar to the death rate from the flu...

So as horrible as this disease has been for adults, as it turns out, it really is a lot like flu for children, though Covid appears to be far more contagious. On the up side, we're almost to the point where more people are vaccinated for Covid than they are flu.

This particular piece is the thing that convinced us it was time to get back on the Disney monorail.

Thankfully my kids are fully-vaccinated adults so I no longer have a horse in this race...but if I did, I'd be thinking about the non-lethal but long-term consequences. We hear a lot of anecdotes about Bad Situations in that category, but not a lot of data. Here's one of the very few "reputable" sources I can find summarizing the data:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2021/03/18/virus-longhaul-cor...-children/

If I did have younger kids who weren't yet eligible for the vaccine, I'd likely still travel this summer, but I'd try to pick settings where it was easier to keep distance most of the time so that I don't have to depend on other people to be reasonable. For what it's worth, that's mostly what we are doing anyway, though we do have some pretty long flights coming up for a couple of these trips.

The list of amusement parks that require masks at all times is getting smaller by the day... Kennywood Park: No masks required for fully vaccinated people.

That's a lot of anecdotes and small studies, which I don't think I would compare with solid aggregate data, which does exist (see my NYT link). I can say, "My kid went back to school in January and is fine," but that's meaningless against the fact that the aggregate school has had four Covid cases total in that time, none of them resulting from or leading to community spread.

Everyone has to make their own choice, but when you can prove with data that cancer is a bigger risk, and one we have zero control over, I'm probably not going to make a very cautious choice.

I'm not sure I understand your comparison to cancer, given that it's not communicable.

But I'm with Brian on this one. Going to Disney where I was guaranteed that every non-vaccinated person has a mask on is different than going to Disney where some portion of non-vaccinated people don't have a mask on. Regardless of the fact that the concern is for my kids and that it's (mostly) outdoors, that's a crap ton of people to interact with. It just feels different (feelings are pending peer review) when it's 10,000 people and we're standing in a line for 30 minutes, some portion of which is indoors, and many of whom are kids who can't have gotten the vaccine. I don't care that in most cases the symptoms are apparently similar to those of the flu. I don't want my kids to get Covid, period.

The NYT opinion piece contains this paragraph:
"Of course, many parents aren’t worried only about death or hospitalization with Covid-19. They are also anxious about chronic long-term effects, like potential neurological or cardiac damage. This is a murkier area — and arguably the best case for treating Covid exposure as different from flu exposure. There is a reason scientists use the term “novel coronavirus” to describe this virus: It’s new. We don’t yet know what its eventual effects will be."

I'm not a super worry wart either. We've been playing pickup ultimate frisbee with the kids for months, unmasked and outdoors. But that's 20 people running past each other and often more than 6' apart (though not always) and often with a decent breeze blowing. I'm also not a "we don't know everything so we have to act like we know nothing." We know a lot, but given the cost/benefit, I feel a whole lot worse about going to Disney in July than I did 24 hours ago.

I bring up the cancer specifically because you can't control your risk for that, and the kids are statistically more likely to die from it. For Covid, you can mitigate the lesser risk as we have been for the last year. Seems like reason enough to worry about it less to me.

And for the record, we don't know what Disney will do. They might card people, wristband the vaccinated... who knows. And I've been in those lines, and they're mostly outdoors at this point (Mickey & Minnie's at DHS is particularly obnoxious and outside). I mean, you do you, but with rising vaccination rates, falling infection rates and no clear end to those trends, I am not particularly worried about my kid's health now, let alone whatever July looks like. The numbers just don't support an increase in concern.

Jeff said:

That's a lot of anecdotes and small studies, which I don't think I would compare with solid aggregate data, which does exist (see my NYT link).

Yeah, that's right---and I think that's what I was trying to say. The NYT article has data about death, but not so much about other consequences. Do kids also experience those at a lower rate? What are they? I don't know.

So, while I don't have any good data about those other consequences, it also wouldn't be such a sacrifice to, say, spend a few weeks on the beach in Hawaii instead of going to Disney, Universal, etc. Seems like an easy call to me, but YMMV and I don't live in the Mouse's backyard. If I did I suspect I'd see it differently.

I find it fascinating to literally have watched the slider move enough for Jeff, but not quite enough for Andy yet.