Coronavirus and Walt Disney World general discussion

[Tink242424]

To add to the above post, the death rate with Covid is much higher than many other diseases where we have achieved herd immunity (TB may be another one) without a vaccine. So the price to pay to get the number needed for herd immunity would be very high. I hope we never have to pay it.

Maybe... But there seem to be some promising treatments that should lower the death rate. If we get a 1 or a few really good treatments then COVID becomes less worrisome and we can go back to life as normal. I just don't think vaccines are the only way out of this.

 

[Tink242424]

It’s been a century since the last plague. A time when people were just coming out of the horse and buggy stage and were just starting to operate automobiles.

We live in a far, far different, absolutely unrecognizable world today, comparatively, with much higher populations and infinitely more interaction between them.

Basically, today, either everyone stays home, or there is a vaccine. Unless either one happens totally, we are dealing with this for a long time.

That’s one of the reasons I continue to be shocked about some of what I read regarding WDW here in some other posts. I think folks will find public opinion right now is more on the side of “I can’t believe they are even open” and “who in their right mind would travel there, of ALL places?” right now. Not “when are they going to remove that mask requirement, I can’t wait to go!”

I mean, I just don’t see it myself...we can’t even consider to go to a movie theater (not that many of us want to), but stepping foot in WDW right now? A place designed to cram as many people in as possible traveling from who knows where?

And even if I forgot all that - I had some magic invisible suit to protect me and my family - I still wouldn’t be going to WDW - the still premium prices and reduced experiences (hours, shows, food availability, no nighttime events) just wouldn’t be worth it.

And in those times they didn't even have basic sanitation. So we are definitely better of than them. The point is that the human race has been through this before and will emerge from this again. The point is that vaccines aren't the only way to herd immunity. Yes, there are challenges but there other ways out of this pandemic.

 

[hopemax]

It’s been a century since the last plague. A time when people were just coming out of the horse and buggy stage and were just starting to operate automobiles.

I think people are more thinking about the 1957 and 1968 influenzas. We didn't do anything and the world didn't end, so why can't we do that now. But as you say, the world was different then. People got their news from an evening news broadcast or their local paper. So most people likely didn't know the extent of the pandemics, they only knew what was happening in their community. Now, we know pretty instantaneously when something happens all over the world, and that affects the reaction.

At least 1 million people died in the 1957 flu. 1-4 million people died in the 1968 flu. If the Internet and Social Media back then, and people were more consciously aware of how many people were dying, I am confident people would have reacted differently. Looking at the Wikipedia entry for 1968. The British post office and train service suffered severe disruptions. In some areas, half the French workforce was bedridden. In Berlin, corpses were stored in the subways. In West Germany, garbage collectors handled bodies because there weren't enough undertakers. If people knew these things were happening, *as they were happening*, things would have played out differently. We just didn't have the communication and cooperation that people and countries have today.

Interesting, because I hadn't seen these particular tidbits before. Vaccines were developed for both flu pandemics. And although they weren't widely available worldwide they did help bring the pandemics to an end. The 1957 vaccine took about 7 months, the 1968 took 4 months to develop. Also, there is partial credit for US schools being on winter break in 1968 for preventing the outbreak from being worse in the US. Also, regarding economic activity during the 1957 influenza: The Dow Jones Industrial Average lost 15% of its value in the second half of 1957.[17] In the United Kingdom, the government paid out £10,000,000 in sickness benefit, and some factories and mines had to close.[3] Many schools had to close in Ireland, including seventeen in Dublin.[19]

So I want to amend my statement. I think people are woefully ignorant about what actually happened during those pandemics, and are underestimating the severity of the effects experienced, because we don't talk about it like we do things like the Great Depression (although, the people who experienced these pandemics had personally lived through the 1918 flu, Great Wars and Depression, so maybe, by comparison a 2 year pandemic, with seasonality, wasn't worth talking about long-term? - food for thought). So since they don't know what bad things happened then, they can't visualize what bad things might happen if we just let this burn through.

 

[Kevin_W]

Herpes. Of course, my looks may be what is protecting me from the herd.

The herpes simplex virus that causes cold sores is estimated to infect 2/3 of the world population under 50 years of age (I have it!). But I don't think it confers any type of herd immunity - people still get cold sores.

 

[brianstl]

Name a disease for which we are protected by herd immunity without a vaccine.

Kind of hard to name because if real heard immunity was achieved the virus died out. There could be thousands of them throughout human history.

 

[TheDisneyDaysOfOurLives]

Yeah, basically nothing has changed. Even removing the advisory doesn't negate the fact that US travelers shouldn't be going outside of the US because of our poor infrastructure today in testing and mitigating the risks associated with COVID-19.

@Tink242424 Glad you found my post funny. I'm glad you saw through the honest reflection of the current states in the US for the underlying joke that no one else got. Hats off to you.

 

[MickeyLuv'r]

I think people are more thinking about the 1957 and 1968 influenzas. We didn't do anything and the world didn't end, so why can't we do that now. But as you say, the world was different then. People got their news from an evening news broadcast or their local paper. So most people likely didn't know the extent of the pandemics, they only knew what was happening in their community. Now, we know pretty instantaneously when something happens all over the world, and that affects the reaction.

Communication may have been a bit slower, but it still existed. I don't think it is accurate to say people only knew about news in their immediate community in 1957, or even in 1918 for that matter. (see below)

On the C-Span website is an interesting talk given by a PA professor in early March of this year about the 1918 flu pandemic, and it played out rather much like the current one is playing out.

The first 2 hard hit cities were Boston and - I think -Philly. Then, just as now, people didn't want to believe it would spread to other cities and then to rural areas.

The precautions used in 1918 were very close to the ones being used today. I watched the lecture back in March, and the similarities are astounding. Instead of electronic PSA's they had public health posters. People reacted then just as they are today. It is almost eerie how much alike they are.


To give you another example: the Titanic sank on April 15, 1912.
Denver Post, Vancouver's The World reported it on Monday, April 15.
London Times/Times Dispatch, San Francisco Chronicle, French Le Petit Parisien, Bloomington's The Daily Pantagraph, and NYT: June 16.
Austria's Die Neue Zeitung had it on April 17.
(and that's as much as I felt like looking it up)

 

[Jedijax719]

To add to the above post, the death rate with Covid is much higher than many other diseases where we have achieved herd immunity (TB may be another one) without a vaccine. So the price to pay to get the number needed for herd immunity would be very high. I hope we never have to pay it.

VERY VERY true!!! This nails it. Let's say that "only" 43% exposure is needed to reach herd immunity (that's a number I've seen in many medical articles). That would be true because COVID-19 has a smaller reproductive rate (R-naught) than, say, the measles (or polio when it was rampant). However, that just speaks to how many people each infected person might infect themselves. That doesn't speak to how easily it does spread between those two people, which is quite efficiently. It also doesn't speak to the idea that we cannot determine by looking who has been infected until they actually show symptoms and/or are tested with a positive result.

That said, if we let natural herd immunity take effect, we would need 43% infected (that is exposed with OR without any symptoms). It's a crapshoot in some sectors of society as to who will become ill and who will not. We absolutely MUST treat this disease as if anyone contracting the virus will become ill and sadly has a chance to die, even if the death rate ranges between 1.5-3.5%. So do the math to determine what the possible fatality number would be if we let 40% become exposed without mitigation. Sure, the fatality/case ration would likely go down quite a bit. However, with 43% exposure and even 1% fatality/case ratio, that's a horrific number of deaths.

Thus we need a vaccine. I've seen that "only 43%" thrown around in other places and it is usually from those who are opposed to vaccines. It's true that many will be exposed without ever showing symptoms or even getting tested and develop immunity. But that's a LARGE, CRAZY number of people to risk in order to achieve the number needed for natural herd immunity. We're talking crimes against humanity.

Now, as far as other plagues and the Spanish Flu, there was just less mobility as @AEfx said. A disease could run through an individual community and eventually burn out much easier because there wasn't quite as much inter-community spread. It was there and the return from WWI kicked the SF'18 into a horrible second wave. But heck we didn't even have the interstate system yet.

 

[lazyboy97o]

Kind of hard to name because if real heard immunity was achieved the virus died out. There could be thousands of them throughout human history.

The event could have been recorded. We know of many outbreaks and pandemics going back centuries. We have records of some diseases going back centuries because they didn’t just die out due to herd immunity.

 

[hopemax]

Communication may have been a bit slower, but it still existed. I don't think it is accurate to say people only knew about news in their immediate community in 1957, or even in 1918 for that matter. (see below)

On the C-Span website is an interesting talk given by a PA professor in early March of this year about the 1918 flu pandemic, and it played out rather much like the current one is playing out.

The first 2 hard hit cities were Boston and - I think -Philly. Then, just as now, people didn't want to believe it would spread to other cities and then to rural areas.

The precautions used in 1918 were very close to the ones being used today. I watched the lecture back in March, and the similarities are astounding. Instead of electronic PSA's they had public health posters. People reacted then just as they are today. It is almost eerie how much alike they are.


To give you another example: the Titanic sank on April 15, 1912.
Denver Post, Vancouver's The World reported it on Monday, April 15.
London Times/Times Dispatch, San Francisco Chronicle, French Le Petit Parisien, Bloomington's The Daily Pantagraph, and NYT: June 16.
Austria's Die Neue Zeitung had it on April 17.
(and that's as much as I felt like looking it up)

Obviously, there was communication. I wasn't implying that people were clueless of events. But it's not nearly the same scale, especially with so much access to personal stories. We can spend all day reading, watching different stories, from multiple countries, multiple states. Some written in media, many just what friends, family, even like this, what forum peeps share. In the past, newspapers could only print so many inches, or show so many minutes during nightly broadcasts. People could talk to their co-workers & friends at the bar, their family on the phone, but they weren't communicating with dozens of strangers sharing their stories like we do here. Those limitations, limit the size and the depth a situation can show.

To use your example of the Titanic, it would be a totally different experience if people were Periscoping or Facebook Live-ing the sinking, and not just relying on the accounts of the survivors. Or even take the explosion in Beirut. We watched the videos of people in their apartment buildings and seeing them makes for a more visceral reaction than a written account and some before and after shots. The latter is a "Terrible event, I can't imagine." The former is "OMG, look at that compression wave, the mushroom cloud, the debris flying, the windows gone, this isn't a Hollywood action shot."

 

[GoofGoof]

VERY VERY true!!! This nails it. Let's say that "only" 43% exposure is needed to reach herd immunity (that's a number I've seen in many medical articles). That would be true because COVID-19 has a smaller reproductive rate (R-naught) than, say, the measles (or polio when it was rampant). However, that just speaks to how many people each infected person might infect themselves. That doesn't speak to how easily it does spread between those two people, which is quite efficiently. It also doesn't speak to the idea that we cannot determine by looking who has been infected until they actually show symptoms and/or are tested with a positive result.

That said, if we let natural herd immunity take effect, we would need 43% infected (that is exposed with OR without any symptoms). It's a crapshoot in some sectors of society as to who will become ill and who will not. We absolutely MUST treat this disease as if anyone contracting the virus will become ill and sadly has a chance to die, even if the death rate ranges between 1.5-3.5%. So do the math to determine what the possible fatality number would be if we let 40% become exposed without mitigation. Sure, the fatality/case ration would likely go down quite a bit. However, with 43% exposure and even 1% fatality/case ratio, that's a horrific number of deaths.

Thus we need a vaccine. I've seen that "only 43%" thrown around in other places and it is usually from those who are opposed to vaccines. It's true that many will be exposed without ever showing symptoms or even getting tested and develop immunity. But that's a LARGE, CRAZY number of people to risk in order to achieve the number needed for natural herd immunity. We're talking crimes against humanity.

Now, as far as other plagues and the Spanish Flu, there was just less mobility as @AEfx said. A disease could run through an individual community and eventually burn out much easier because there wasn't quite as much inter-community spread. It was there and the return from WWI kicked the SF'18 into a horrible second wave. But heck we didn't even have the interstate system yet.

You are also assuming people can only be infected once and have lifetime immunity. If the 43% of the population was exposed simultaneously (or within the period they remain immune) then in theory you could have enough infection to reach herd immunity. If for example in a year that immunity runs out then all the people infected in March and April go back in the pool of people not immune. So if the herd immunity percentage is not reached in time to snuff the virus out you essentially start all over. Now with a vaccine it’s possible to vaccinate enough people at once to snuff it out. Outside of deliberately infecting millions we aren’t going to get there naturally very fast. Even if herd immunity is achieved at 43% (the very low end of the possible numbers) that’s still almost 150M Americans that need to be infected. If that happens by March the hospitals will almost certainly be overrun (we’ve only had a fraction of those cases so far in 5+ months and came pretty close to hospitals overrun) and millions will have died. Lets hope that doesn’t happen.

 

[GoofGoof]

From WebMD:

How Do You Achieve Herd Immunity?

There are two ways this can happen.


You can develop resistance naturally. When your body is exposed to a virus or bacteria, it makes antibodies to fight off the infection. When you recover, your body keeps these antibodies. Your body will defend against another infection. This is what stopped the Zika virus outbreak in Brazil. Two years after the outbreak began, 63% of the population had had exposure to the virus. Researchers think the community reached the right level for herd immunity.


Vaccines can also build resistance. They make your body think a virus or bacteria has infected it. You don’t get sick, but your immune system still makes protective antibodies. The next time your body meets that bacteria or virus, it’s ready to fight it off. This is what stopped polio in the United States.



When does a community reach herd immunity? It depends on the reproduction number, or R0. The R0 tells you the average number of people that a single person with the virus can infect if those people aren’t already immune. The higher the R0, the more people need to be resistant to reach herd immunity.


Researchers think that the R0 for COVID-19 is between 2 and 3. This means that one person can infect two to three other people. It also means 50% to 67% of the population would need to be resistant before herd immunity kicks in and the infection rates start to go down.

The other option is the virus burns itself out through isolation and preventative measures like SARS in China. They had nowhere near enough people infected to reach herd immunity, they just put in strict precautions to prevent the spread and the virus burned itself out. Unfortunately, this one is more infectious and less serious symptoms in a lot of cases so harder to get to that point.

 

[Jedijax719]

You are also assuming people can only be infected once and have lifetime immunity. If the 43% of the population was exposed simultaneously (or within the period they remain immune) then in theory you could have enough infection to reach herd immunity. If for example in a year that immunity runs out then all the people infected in March and April go back in the pool of people not immune. So if the herd immunity percentage is not reached in time to snuff the virus out you essentially start all over. Now with a vaccine it’s possible to vaccinate enough people at once to snuff it out. Outside of deliberately infecting millions we aren’t going to get there naturally very fast. Even if herd immunity is achieved at 43% (the very low end of the possible numbers) that’s still almost 150M Americans that need to be infected. If that happens by March the hospitals will almost certainly be overrun (we’ve only had a fraction of those cases so far in 5+ months and came pretty close to hospitals overrun) and millions will have died. Lets hope that doesn’t happen.

Okay, yes I will definitely concede to your point without any debate at all. You are absolutely correct. Thus, it makes it even more difficult to reach any sort of fictional natural herd immunity (without a death rate that is so astronomical we cannot even imagine). And that is even if the 43% is spread out over time.

As for the R0 number, for COVID-19 (like other diseases), it is lower when mitigation efforts are in place because there are less to infect. If we just "let it rip" then the R0 will rise because there are SO many opportunities for the virus to "find" a host. And with a higher R0 number, the fatality/case ration climbs because of obvious reasons.

 

[Nordic4tKnight]

Here is our schools plan, no idea if it is over complicated but it emphasizes K-3 in school as much as possible:

Essentially, the Back to School 2020-21 Plan brings students and staff in grades K-3 to their home schools every day at the same times that we have had for the respective schools in past years.

Students in grades 4-5 will be relocated to the high school building and will be assigned rooms throughout the school. Students in those grades from all elementary schools will be at the high school for four days per week. The fifth day (Wednesday) will be virtual. Their starting time will be roughly 8:00-8:10 a.m., which is a change for the students in four of the elementary schools.

Students in grades 6-8 will remain in their respective middle schools, with half of the students coming in two designated days each week and alternating with the other half of the student body for two opposite days. One day per week (Wednesday) will be virtual for all, with opportunities for individual students to access assistance and support. Middle school times will remain the same as in past years.

Students in grades 9-12 will be virtual for four days per week. On the fifth day (Wednesday), students may come to school for MAST and for some in-building classes with elements that cannot be done at home, such as labs, as well as components of MOMENTUM, Research, VANTAGE and more. There will also be other help sessions and opportunities to meet in person or virtually with counselors and social workers.

 

[MickeyLuv'r]

Obviously, there was communication. I wasn't implying that people were clueless of events.

I agree with your most recent post...I think the main point I was making was more....how little we have changed. Look at the WPA posters from that era. They say almost the SAME THING as PSA's in 2020!

It is just a little depressing that with all the supposed speed of news in 2020, nothing has changed. I find it depressing that in 2020 we still need to remind people to STAY HOME when they are sick.

 

[GoofGoof]

Okay, yes I will definitely concede to your point without any debate at all. You are absolutely correct. Thus, it makes it even more difficult to reach any sort of fictional natural herd immunity (without a death rate that is so astronomical we cannot even imagine). And that is even if the 43% is spread out over time.

As for the R0 number, for COVID-19 (like other diseases), it is lower when mitigation efforts are in place because there are less to infect. If we just "let it rip" then the R0 will rise because there are SO many opportunities for the virus to "find" a host. And with a higher R0 number, the fatality/case ration climbs because of obvious reasons.

Yep, It’s a classic catch 22. In order to reach herd immunity you need to increase the spread of the disease but if you reduce or remove mitigation efforts to increase infection rate in an attempt to get there sooner that results in a higher R0 and a higher percentage of people who need to be infected to reach herd immunity.

 

[MisterPenguin]

I presume 'expulsion' would exclude the child from access to the district's online distance learning. The parent would then be on their own to do home schooling.

BTW, the teen petitioned the school and the expulsion was dropped.

 

[Jedijax719]

BTW, the teen petitioned the school and the expulsion was dropped.

There will be a lot of head scratching if no outbreaks come from that school. Everyone is expecting it and it's a perfect storm for it. If there are none, it will become the poster child for "let's open all schools with all kids-no virtual offered".

 

[brianstl]

There will be a lot of head scratching if no outbreaks come from that school. Everyone is expecting it and it's a perfect storm for it. If there are none, it will become the poster child for "let's open all schools with all kids-no virtual offered".

I don’t think any of the spikes in Europe have been traced back to schools.

 

[MisterPenguin]

There will be a lot of head scratching if no outbreaks come from that school. Everyone is expecting it and it's a perfect storm for it. If there are none, it will become the poster child for "let's open all schools with all kids-no virtual offered".

It's already in the news about schools that have already had to reclose due to outbreaks. The genie has left that bottle.