Coronavirus and Walt Disney World general discussion

[Touchdown]

I'm a fairweather visitor to this page. When we talk about other states surpassing NY, isn't that because of more testing? We formerly didn't test people that weren't sick enough to need care. That directive went on for at least a couple months. No? My point being that NY likely had way way way more cases that were unaccounted for.

You are right, but it’s still not a good milestone, especially when Florida was nearly untouched in the early months.

 

[WDWTrojan]

To some degree I agree with you but I also see the other side. The science behind masks and completely shutting down the economy is not 100%. I do think in March/April we needed to take a drastic approach as there was so much we didn't know. Now I don't agree with how we are proceeding. I think we are going too slow and also destroying small businesses but allowing large businesses to go unharmed. This is not using a common sense approach but it seems targeted to destroy our economy and not to keep people safe.

The other part of American unwillingness to accept the mask mandate is part science but also part government over-reach. There are a growing number of citizens that are asking how did we end up here? In 4 months the government has destroyed the economy and turned citizens against one another. Could there be another agenda going on here that is taking advantage of the situation? I am very worried about the government mandating what citizens do without following our constitution and how laws go into effect. We should be questioning these things as citizens. It is more than just mandating masks at this point.

All this to say that yes COVID is real (I have had it and so far am suffering from some lingering lung damage so I understand why we have to take this serious) and we need to change some behavior to keep the disease from taking on uncontrolled growth. But at this point it is not going to ever go back to zero unless something miraculous happens. Can we all just be a little kinder and not call everyone who questions the current narrative selfish or just in it for themselves? There are many reasons to question things and while we all aren't experts we have the right to make decisions for ourselves and our families.

No, there is no other agenda and there is no government overreach. This is about protecting the health and safety of the public, by both keeping people from being infected and reducing the burden on our healthcare system.

We enact common-sense laws to keep people safe all the time (see: seatbelts, speed limits, food safety laws, etc) - a law that can keep many alive and thousands out of hospitals is necessary.

 

[Lilofan]

I believe that’s where all the hypodermic needles dumped off the Jersey Shore washed up I’m really dating myself with that reference. Happened so long ago WDW was still only 2 parks and River Country

And guests swam in Seven Seas Lagoon without getting eaten by

 

[October82]

No, there is no other agenda and there is no government overreach. This is about protecting the health and safety of the public, by both keeping people from being infected and reducing the burden on our healthcare system.

We enact common-sense laws to keep people safe all the time (see: seatbelts, speed limits, food safety laws, etc) - a law that can keep many alive and thousands out of hospitals is necessary.

It saddens me that we've gotten to the point in politics where the idea that "the other side" has a nefarious hidden agenda is seen as plausible enough by so many that there's doubt around public health measures.

 

[Disstevefan1]

How many more drug overdoses and addictions happened?
How much more family/child violence has happened?
How much more depression has happened?

Sady true. Sadly could be a net loss of life. I was just replying to the silver lining thread.

 

[xdan0920]

Not so fast Florida and Texas...theres a new sheriff in town.

They had a very strict lockdown. Followed by very strict mask rules. That’s hard to explain.

 

[xdan0920]

How many more drug overdoses and addictions happened?
How much more family/child violence has happened?
How much more depression has happened?

Sadly I have personal experience with this. A friends mother committed suicide a couple weeks ago. Lockdowns cost her, her business, her apartment, and her ability to see her kids and grandkids. Brutal.

 

[SamusAranX]

They had a very strict lockdown. Followed by very strict mask rules. That’s hard to explain.

In the end, the lockdown and mandates are only as good as the enforcement and self discipline; are businesses actually listening? Are people avoiding big groups? Staying home if sick?

just a personal anecdote; I stopped at gas station in Florida yesterday in a county under a mandatory mask mandate. I go inside and I see: A family of 6 not wearing masks; no consternation by the employees or management. Another adult not wearing a mask. I’m the ONLY guest wearing one. What good is a mandate if no one is going to follow or enforce it?
Now if Cali is having good enforcement and what not and cases are still rising exponentially then I don’t know what to say. We are in trouble then

 

[Disstevefan1]

They had a very strict lockdown. Followed by very strict mask rules. That’s hard to explain.

Everyone in CA please go home and resume lockdowns now. That should do it.

Seriously, CA is a HUGE state! Probably hot spots contributing to the overall numbers. 7.6 positivity rate is not the worst thing.

We simply can't be in lockdown forever.
Keep calm and mask on.

 

[GoofGoof]

They had a very strict lockdown. Followed by very strict mask rules. That’s hard to explain.

Except they didn’t have strict mask rules right away. It wasn’t until towards the end of June once cases were already spiking that the governor put in a state wide mask rule. He has acknowledged that was a mistake. Their re-opening started in May.

 

[GoofGoof]

I'm a fairweather visitor to this page. When we talk about other states surpassing NY, isn't that because of more testing? We formerly didn't test people that weren't sick enough to need care. That directive went on for at least a couple months. No? My point being that NY likely had way way way more cases that were unaccounted for.

Fair point, but with positivity rates between 10 and 15% over the past month or so in FL they also are not catching nearly all of the sick people now either. Who knows how many people were sick and were never tested in either place.

 

[oceanbreeze77]

They had a very strict lockdown. Followed by very strict mask rules. That’s hard to explain.

Except they didn’t have strict mask rules right away. It wasn’t until towards the end of June once cases were already spiking that the governor put in a state wide mask rule. He has acknowledged that was a mistake. Their re-opening started in May.

We also had a VERY rapid reopening.

 

[Kamikaze]

Anyone care to put a spin on this?

After falling for months, Covid-19 hospitalizations in the US are nearing April's peak | CNN

After falling for months, Covid-19 hospitalizations across the US are on the upswing and approaching the peak levels seen in April.

www.cnn.com

The only spin you can put is that in April it was confined to very few states. This number is for the entire country. So the hospitals aren't as overwhelmed.

 

[Kamikaze]

I'm a fairweather visitor to this page. When we talk about other states surpassing NY, isn't that because of more testing? We formerly didn't test people that weren't sick enough to need care. That directive went on for at least a couple months. No? My point being that NY likely had way way way more cases that were unaccounted for.

Not really. The NY/NJ/CT numbers for the past two months are very good (even with slight upticks) because of mask usage and enforcement. So the headstart we had should have been insurmountable by other states if they enforced the same kinds of things.

Yes, the shortage of tests did keep the numbers down, but a lot of cases in the beginning where labeled as COVID even without a test, and those all count in the numbers.

 

[TJJohn12]

We also had a VERY rapid reopening.

And there's large swaths of the state that don't look like our popular stereotype of "California" - the Central Valley often looks more like Alabama or Kentucky than Marin County or the Hollywood Hills.

 

[xdan0920]

Except they didn’t have strict mask rules right away. It wasn’t until towards the end of June once cases were already spiking that the governor put in a state wide mask rule. He has acknowledged that was a mistake. Their re-opening started in May.

LA County did. And they have it the worst. Mask mandate on May 14th, with near 100% compliance.

 

[xdan0920]

Not really. The NY/NJ/CT numbers for the past two months are very good (even with slight upticks) because of mask usage and enforcement. So the headstart we had should have been insurmountable by other states if they enforced the same kinds of things.

Yes, the shortage of tests did keep the numbers down, but a lot of cases in the beginning where labeled as COVID even without a test, and those all count in the numbers.

Our numbers our down, not sure you can ascribe it to mask usage though. More likely the Virus ran out of people to infect.

 

[mmascari]

To some degree I agree with you but I also see the other side. The science behind masks and completely shutting down the economy is not 100%. I do think in March/April we needed to take a drastic approach as there was so much we didn't know. Now I don't agree with how we are proceeding. I think we are going too slow and also destroying small businesses but allowing large businesses to go unharmed. This is not using a common sense approach but it seems targeted to destroy our economy and not to keep people safe.

The is no question about the science behind the initial complete shutdown. Given run away community spread of a disease with no ability to isolate all cases, no ability to trace contacts, no ability to quickly test and isolate contacts, there's only so many ways left to disrupt the transmission. A complete shutdown is the hammer of tools to stop community spread. It's not subtle, targeted, precise, or even dependent on how transmission works. It's designed to do exactly one thing, simply stop all interactions to reduce transmission through brute force. It's goal is to buy time to figure out a better solution.

It's definitely not a long term solution. It's not meant to be, and trying to use it as a long term fix isn't going to work.

But at this point it is not going to ever go back to zero unless something miraculous happens.

We didn't use the time we bought to solve any of those issues. The longer we delay, the larger the problem gets. It's like ignoring a small leak. Once it turns into a torrent of water, it's a much harder problem to solve.

I'm going to get in my time machine real quick and go back three months. In the middle of April, we were over a month removed from things going crazy in Italy. At first everyone thought we were going to turn into Italy with people dying on the floors of hospitals, but as it turns out, we realize that aside from NYC the hospitals are pretty much empty, and even there the hospitals were not overrun anything like we assumed they would be. Just a few weeks later, things were opening back up and people were seeing that our hospital system was not overrun.

Over the last 6-7 weeks, I've heard constantly how much worse the situation going to be, because 1) The number positive cases are so high in this country making America is the laughing stock of the world, 2) The percent positive in testing is so high, we should be ashamed of ourselves, and 3) Our hospital system is so close to being overwhelmed, this thing is out of control!!!

According to CNN, things have gotten so bad with the virus that after weeks and weeks of worry and doomsday predictions, we've only almost gotten back to the levels of hospitalization we were at in the middle of April? And that's somehow bad news?

Call crazy for not buying into the hysteria, but the media and the dooms-dayers sound to me like the boy who cried "wolf".

We did stuff, adjusted behaviors, shutdown, then opened back up, then withdrew again. All those things impact how close or not or overwhelmed the hospital infrastructure gets. We don't want to wait for it to fail before adjusting. It's a much much larger problem if we wait for it to fail first, as the ripple effects of the failure cause more failures and just make the problem bigger and harder to fix. When someone says "Based on today, we'll have an issue in 3 weeks" and we change what's being done, then don't have an issue in 3 weeks. That doesn't mean it was false, it means we impacted the environment and prevented the failure.

They had a very strict lockdown. Followed by very strict mask rules. That’s hard to explain.

What I wrote here: https://forums.wdwmagic.com/threads...-world-general-discussion.963478/post-9348790

1. For every positive test, quarantine and trace every contact they had over the last 2-3 days.
2. Test every contact.
3. Repeat 2-3 until all contacts are negative.

That's the solution. Really the only solution that will reduce the spread instead of just slow it. Are we seeing that loop being executed in 1 to 3 days in CA? Or, are they like the other reports where that loop takes 6 to 14+ days? It's not an effective loop when it's that slow.

Masks, distancing, and self isolation, are all designed to slow the transmission. They'll never reduce it into containment. As the community spread continues to grow, it'll get to large again and require full community isolation to break the cycle.

We don't give everyone a TB vaccine and it's rare in the US, mostly with people who get it while traveling. When, someone presents with it, we test, trace, test every trace and repeat all very quickly. Isolating the spread before it's large enough for this to not work.

 

[Dizneykid]

Fair point, but with positivity rates between 10 and 15% over the past month or so in FL they also are not catching nearly all of the sick people now either. Who knows how many people were sick and were never tested in either place.

Yes and we need to closely watch that mortality rate. So far, NY has the highest count and that aligns with a likely conclusion that they will be the hardest hit. While the governors try to flex on each other, most people are hoping the death rate flattens everywhere.

 

[GoofGoof]

LA County did. And they have it the worst. Mask mandate on May 14th, with near 100% compliance.

It’s the same problem as FL, an inconsistent message across the board. When one county has masks but you can drive down the road and the next doesn‘t it sends a mixed message and leads to less compliance. Doing it at the state level makes it more likely to succeed (federal would be ideal, but we know that’s out). I know you don’t buy into masks, but distancing combined with capacity limits combined with masks are the best plan we have right now to slow the spread and the best way to allow people to continue to interact and keep the economy going.

CA also allowed bars and indoor dining to open too fast, also a mistake acknowledged by the governor. Once you have community spread so widespread it’s pretty hard to reverse course so we will see how the changes made in the past few weeks work out. I don’t see it having a huge impact for at least a few weeks more.