Coronavirus and Walt Disney World general discussion

[Smooth]

From one idiot to another.... I'm the only sane person left in the world.

 

[DisneyFan32]

and I bet you if we have another epidemic in like 5 years, they'll say "ohh it was the vaccine!!!! They did it on PURPOSE!!!!"

Oh please not more epidemic sooner by five years please it's not gonna happen?

 

[oceanbreeze77]

Oh please not more epidemic sooner by five years please it's not gonna happen?

hopefully it won't, but scientists have been warning about this stuff for decades now, and with the acceleration of global warming comes higher risks of such occasions.

 

[ImperfectPixie]

Oh please not more epidemic sooner by five years please it's not gonna happen?

Highly unlikely.

Also, keep in mind that we've had many very small epidemics in between 1918 and now. COVID is a once-every-100-years kind of event.

 

[GoofGoof]

Ever the optimist. We all hope you're right. (It's people, not the vaccine that I don't trust)

Welcome to my dystopian nightmare of a prediction. Solely based on peoples actions, not any underlying possibility. The future some seem to want while also professing that it's no big deal.

Now, please go back to your optimistic take. We're all doomed if you lose hope too. Someone has to give us hope.

I had spent the better part of 9 months starting in March 2020 feeling pretty pessimistic about this whole situation until those results from the first vaccine trials came out and were wildly more positive than anyone imagined was possible. The hope was they were at least 60% effective but we got so much more. The vaccine rollout itself started painfully slow but then we started ramping up manufacturing and also vaccinations. IMHO it’s been one of the most remarkable things we’ve been able to accomplish as a nation in a long time. Look at the rest of the world, we are getting such a great supply of really good vaccines. It’s incredible to see.

This vaccine process has been a really great thing we should all feel incredibly optimistic about. I get that people have fears that vaccine hesitancy will slow the process or even stop the vaccines from getting us where we want to be and I get there is the potential for new vaccine resistant variants to emerge and become dominant in the US, but those are only possible scenarios and not guaranteed or even necessarily likely to happen. I choose to be more optimistic and assume that the other possible scenario that the vaccines work and we see cases drop enough to reach a return to normal is more likely. I know I don’t know if that will happen any more than someone knows an escape variant will emerge or vaccine hesitancy will stall the process.

My opinion is based on hope but also grounded in reality. We have real world examples in other countries that are ahead of us on vaccinations to see what the potential impact can be. We have numerous polls that say vaccine acceptance will be north of 70% and 65+ around 85%. Right now the 65+ demographic is 81% and still climbing. It hasn’t stalled out. We are close to seeing the demographic group who had first access to the vaccine get pretty close to the number in the poll so it’s not unreasonable to think the 70%+ could be a good number. Getting to 70% of the eligible Americans 12+ will get us over 60% of the total population. We will have more than enough doses to vaccinate those people by the end of May. I am actually optimistic that we can get closer to 80% of the eligible people vaccinated which gets us to 68% of the general population. We are seeing in a country like Israel that 59% of the population with 1 shot was enough to maybe reach herd immunity. We can get there and get there in less than 6 weeks.

If for some reason that’s not enough to get us where we want to be then it’s on to plan B, but let’s give plan A a chance first before just assuming all these possible negative outcomes are a foregone conclusion. Let’s see if vaccine hesitancy is an actual problem. We knew from day 1 100% of the people wouldn’t get the vaccine. The only open question is will enough people get it to get us out of this.

 

[havoc315]

We shall see. I have more confidence in the vaccines and their prospects to help us return to normal, but that’s been true from the start.

If the cases don’t fall to an “acceptable level” in the next 3-4 months then there’s really no reason to assume they ever will.

There will be differences of opinion as to "acceptable level"
Many say we are already at an "acceptable level."

I define acceptable level as the level achieves for measles, mumps, polio, etc. The diseases for which we have effective vaccines.
If this becomes like the flu, where vaccines suppress it a bit but outbreaks continue.. then that's our failure as a society.

If vaccines remain 90%+ effective (and newer variants don't reduce that effectiveness), then we will eventually see further decline, even after 3-4 months. More natural infection for those unvaccinated. Younger people eventually facing mandatory vaccination, just as with measles and mumps. So it can continue to decline beyond 3-4 months. Though, it newer variants "escape" the vaccine with higher percentage, then that's where Covid persists forever. (flu vaccines are only 50-60% effective, highly variable depending on the flu variants in any given season).

I have been opposed to the “plan” of just learning to live with the virus from day 1 but that was mostly based on an alternative of mitigations and holding the line until vaccines come out. If the vaccines don’t get the cases to a low enough level I think we actually have to consider just learning to live with the virus.

I'm 100% certain that mitigation combined with a high enough level of vaccination will [practically] erase Covid. There may be small clusters but the actual pandemic would end.

Obviously a “doom‘s day“ scenario, but if it’s 20,000 cases a day but deaths drop under 100 due to a combination of more vulnerable people being vaccinated and better treatments then maybe the cases per day can be a little higher. That’s so far down the line and hard to predict at this point.

Not that far down the line. If we actually are following Israel's track, we would get under 20,000 cases per day within a few weeks. Under 10,000 in 6 weeks.
But I don't think we are on their track as we don't have the stomach for the necessary actions. (as a society).

I don‘t think we can in any meaningful way predict what cases will be in August as we sit here today. We don’t know how many people will actually get the vaccines, how many people need to be vaccinated to reach herd immunity and what will change with mutations and with treatments. People need to continue mitigations and continue to get vaccinated as the vaccines become available. That‘s all we can do.

We can choose policies of mitigation. We can institute policies (both stick and carrot) that drive up vaccination. And as a society, we can just be smart enough to get vaccinated.
If we get vaccinated in sufficient numbers, this will go away. If we get vaccinated in sufficient numbers with appropriate mitigation, this goes away much faster.

 

[willtravel]

We can't do anything with extra vaccine thanks to the former occupant. He explicitly wrote into the contracts with the vaccine makers we can't share any extra.

Then how did we donate vaccine supplies to Canada?

 

[Jenny72]

The fact that people are proposing that polio isn't really that bad is indicative of the current predicament. No. Polio is bad.

I'm hardly saying one should never question the medical profession. It's pretty wise to keep an eye on over-medication or coordination of treatment when you're a patient. Getting a second opinion is a good idea and asking questions is smart. But this type of thinking is really worrisome.

I don't think yelling at people is helpful but I don't know what the right solution is except to try to reach people where they are. It would help if Covid had an exotic name that makes it sound more like Ebola. No one argues that you just need to eat apples and jog to avoid Ebola.

 

[DisneyFan32]

I had spent the better part of 9 months starting in March 2020 feeling pretty pessimistic about this whole situation until those results from the first vaccine trials came out and were wildly more positive than anyone imagined was possible. The hope was they were at least 60% effective but we got so much more. The vaccine rollout itself started painfully slow but then we started ramping up manufacturing and also vaccinations. IMHO it’s been one of the most remarkable things we’ve been able to accomplish as a nation in a long time. Look at the rest of the world, we are getting such a great supply of really good vaccines. It’s incredible to see.

This vaccine process has been a really great thing we should all feel incredibly optimistic about. I get that people have fears that vaccine hesitancy will slow the process or even stop the vaccines from getting us where we want to be and I get there is the potential for new vaccine resistant variants to emerge and become dominant in the US, but those are only possible scenarios and not guaranteed or even necessarily likely to happen. I choose to be more optimistic and assume that the other possible scenario that the vaccines work and we see cases drop enough to reach a return to normal is more likely. I know I don’t know if that will happen any more than someone knows an escape variant will emerge or vaccine hesitancy will stall the process.

My opinion is based on hope but also grounded in reality. We have real world examples in other countries that are ahead of us on vaccinations to see what the potential impact can be. We have numerous polls that say vaccine acceptance will be north of 70% and 65+ around 85%. Right now the 65+ demographic is 81% and still climbing. It hasn’t stalled out. We are close to seeing the demographic group who had first access to the vaccine get pretty close to the number in the poll so it’s not unreasonable to think the 70%+ could be a good number. Getting to 70% of the eligible Americans 12+ will get us over 60% of the total population. We will have more than enough doses to vaccinate those people by the end of May. I am actually optimistic that we can get closer to 80% of the eligible people vaccinated which gets us to 68% of the general population. We are seeing in a country like Israel that 59% of the population with 1 shot was enough to maybe reach herd immunity. We can get there and get there in less than 6 weeks.

If for some reason that’s not enough to get us where we want to be then it’s on to plan B, but let’s give plan A a chance first before just assuming all these possible negative outcomes are a foregone conclusion. Let’s see if vaccine hesitancy is an actual problem. We knew from day 1 100% of the people wouldn’t get the vaccine. The only open question is will enough people get it to get us out of this.

You can know that President Biden will do something with vaccine hesitancy and new variants to get back to normal faster by July.

 

[seabreezept813]

1. Epcot opening at 11.
2. Park reservations
3. Menus diminished
4. Closure of some restaurants
5. Outdoor masking still required

I’m noticing none of these lists include not being about to hug characters. For us, we need that Mickey hug (at least our 3 year old certainly does).

 

[lazyboy97o]

Then how did we donate vaccine supplies to Canada?

They were loaned, not donated.

 

[seabreezept813]

Here's an anecdote.

One of the nurses who works in our clinic contracted COVID-19. She follows the same protocols as everyone else, and does not know how she contracted it. Unfortunately, she was initially hesitant to take the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines offered by the hospital to all employees, so she only received one dose before she became ill.

She's back to work now and feeling fine, but she reports that her bout of COVID was just about the worst illness she ever experienced. Severe headaches, muscle and joint pain, and nausea and vomiting so bad that she needed two trips to the ER for IV hydration. Fortunately, her breathing held up, so she did not need a hospital admission. Even after most of her other symptoms resolved, she was so fatigued that she could barely get out of bed for several days. B.1.1.7 is now the dominant strain locally, so even though her sample never underwent genotype screening, this is likely the one that caused her infection.

This nurse is generally in good health. Late 30s, healthy body mass index, and takes only a low dose of one medication to control blood pressure. But COVID still knocked her out for about 2 weeks, and she came within a hair of needing a hospital stay. Now fortunately, she was covered by the hospital's COVID policy that offers full medical leave for any employee that contracts the disease. If she had not been lucky to work as a nurse for a hospital with a generous sick leave policy, though, she would have missed about 2.5 weeks of salary and received two large ER bills to boot.

The take-aways from this case that we can generalize (because they fit with the larger trends):

1) This is not last year's COVID. The new variants are both much more contagious and making younger people quite a bit sicker than the wild type.

2) Despite a case of COVID-19 managing to breech the defenses of our clinic, nobody else became ill. Why? We can never be 100% sure, but most likely because all but two other staff members have been fully vaccinated since March, at the latest, and some of us much earlier. Not only did none of the other staff become ill, but none of our unvaccinated family members got sick either. These vaccines are extremely powerful tools against the virus. This is what herd immunity looks like on a personal level.

3) Even a case of COVID from which the patient completely recovers and does not require hospitalization can cause them to go through hell that they would never want to repeat or wish on anyone.

Get vaccinated!

Local 20 something emt in our state is in a coma from covid...didn’t take the vaccine because they said they wanted others to get it first. If people won’t do it for themselves, do it for their families.. their communities.

 

[GoofGoof]

We can't do anything with extra vaccine thanks to the former occupant. He explicitly wrote into the contracts with the vaccine makers we can't share any extra.

Then how did we donate vaccine supplies to Canada?

We can lend doses to other countries as long as those countries eventually buy replacement vaccines and return the doses to us. In this case it’s not a knock against the former POTUS. The clause was added to protect the vaccine manufacturers. They knew that the US and EU and others were buying many more doses than they needed and didn’t want those countries to dump large quantities on the market for free or at a steep discount. The manufactures want to ensure they can continue to sell doses to other nations going forward. They can and probably will renegotiate that clause, but it’s too soon yet.

 

[GoofGoof]

There will be differences of opinion as to "acceptable level"
Many say we are already at an "acceptable level."

I define acceptable level as the level achieves for measles, mumps, polio, etc. The diseases for which we have effective vaccines.
If this becomes like the flu, where vaccines suppress it a bit but outbreaks continue.. then that's our failure as a society.

If vaccines remain 90%+ effective (and newer variants don't reduce that effectiveness), then we will eventually see further decline, even after 3-4 months. More natural infection for those unvaccinated. Younger people eventually facing mandatory vaccination, just as with measles and mumps. So it can continue to decline beyond 3-4 months. Though, it newer variants "escape" the vaccine with higher percentage, then that's where Covid persists forever. (flu vaccines are only 50-60% effective, highly variable depending on the flu variants in any given season).



I'm 100% certain that mitigation combined with a high enough level of vaccination will [practically] erase Covid. There may be small clusters but the actual pandemic would end.





Not that far down the line. If we actually are following Israel's track, we would get under 20,000 cases per day within a few weeks. Under 10,000 in 6 weeks.
But I don't think we are on their track as we don't have the stomach for the necessary actions. (as a society).




We can choose policies of mitigation. We can institute policies (both stick and carrot) that drive up vaccination. And as a society, we can just be smart enough to get vaccinated.
If we get vaccinated in sufficient numbers, this will go away. If we get vaccinated in sufficient numbers with appropriate mitigation, this goes away much faster.

We can agree to disagree. You have made your opinions clear that you do not believe the vaccines will work in the US. I choose to remain optimistic and see how it plays out. Neither of us knows what will happen. Your idea of success appears to be cases going to near zero and so if that‘s the metric then I agree we may not hit that in 3-4 months or ever. I think we can and will see a return to normal and a relaxing of restrictions when cases are higher than that.

 

[JoeCamel]

We can lend doses to other countries as long as those countries eventually buy replacement vaccines and return the doses to us. In this case it’s not a knock against the former POTUS. The clause was added to protect the vaccine manufacturers. They knew that the US and EU and others were buying many more doses than they needed and didn’t want those countries to dump large quantities on the market for free or at a steep discount. The manufactures want to ensure they can continue to sell doses to other nations going forward. They can and probably will renegotiate that clause, but it’s too soon yet.

Just an opinion but for what we paid we should own the patents for the vaccine, no other country could have provided the incentive for development and the price paid was above average. I doubt they would have been developed in as short of time or at all because it was the right thing to do.

 

[GoofGoof]

Just an opinion but for what we paid we should own the patents for the vaccine, no other country could have provided the incentive for development and the price paid was above average. I doubt they would have been developed in as short of time or at all because it was the right thing to do.

Yep and that’s why I think the clause will be ignored eventually. Remember back when these contracts were negotiated we wanted to lock in those doses and would write just about anything into the contract to get it done. Now that each of the companies involved has made a good bit of profit from the process I doubt they will hold us to the contracts and even if they do we can always lend the doses and just never get paid back

 

[DisneyFan32]

We can agree to disagree. You have made your opinions clear that you do not believe the vaccines will work in the US. I choose to remain optimistic and see how it plays out. Neither of us knows what will happen. Your idea of success appears to be cases going to near zero and so if that‘s the metric then I agree we may not hit that in 3-4 months or ever. I think we can and will see a return to normal and a relaxing of restrictions when cases are higher than that.

Yeah I'm worried about new variants in the future to end the vaccines, it makes me so worried. Is really gonna happen or not? Is by July we might go back to normal with possible masks and social distancing will be relaxing?

 

[ImperfectPixie]

Yeah I'm worried about new variants in the future to end the vaccines, it makes me so worried. Is really gonna happen or not? Is by July we might go back to normal with possible masks and social distancing will be relaxing?

No one knows if there will be variations that will evade the current vaccines. The good news is that we know they can modify the vaccines as necessary to combat any variants...they just need a little time to do that. We also don't know when things will be completely back to normal, but we're heading in the right direction.

Be patient.

 

[correcaminos]

I’m noticing none of these lists include not being about to hug characters. For us, we need that Mickey hug (at least our 3 year old certainly does).

Nope, not into characters though I get it. We're just well beyond that stage here. Same with shows really but that's something I know many totally miss!

 

[GoofGoof]

Yeah I'm worried about new variants in the future to end the vaccines, it makes me so worried. Is really gonna happen or not? Is by July we might go back to normal with possible masks and social distancing will be relaxing?

Nothing to worry about. You got your vaccine and everyone else will soon too. Just keep following the rules until we don’t need them anymore. The end is near.