Coronavirus and Walt Disney World general discussion

[Tom P.]

I don't know how many people would keep a Disney reservation without any parks open. I guess some still could, but what do you do with them in various resorts? I know in WDW pro's post, he has said that one plan is to only initially open the mk area resorts. Do you just bump everyone up without charging them more? Interesting to think about what they would do.

I still think it makes sense for Walt Disney World to only consider re-opening, in any form, once Florida has reached Phase 2 or, perhaps most likely, Phase 3 of the federal guidelines. In the first place, the experience of attempting to operate under Phase 1, even if technically permitted, would be so restrictive as to make it an unpleasant experience for most guests. In the second place, I think Disney is going to want to see a couple of weeks of data from Phase 1 showing that infection rates are not spiking again before they let people back in and risk a big spike being centered on their property. Therefore, I tend to think that we still have a way to go in looking at data before any reasonable prediction can be made as to when WDW will actually re-open. But that's just my opinion.

 

[Tom P.]

I think boarding groups could work for a select few rides but it would be messy for all rides. The other question is do they still allow FP+? If so that means very limited boarding group capacity.

I agree with you. I think boarding groups could work for a few select "headliner" rides that they know are going to have large crowds otherwise. And perhaps with people allowed to join more than one boarding group per day and be placed in staggered times. But beyond that, I don't see boarding groups as being a workable solution for the rest of the park.

I think for everything except the headliners, they need to do one of two things: Either they need to make everything FastPass+ only, so that there is no standby line and people have a relatively short wait. Or they need to do away with FP+ altogether temporarily and make everything that doesn't have a BG a standby-only situation, which would also keep lines shorter. In either case, they are going to have to develop some system for encouraging/enforcing social distancing between people who are waiting in line.

And, in all these cases, even with BG's, they are going to have to adjust capacity and seating patterns on rides and attractions to maintain social distancing during the rides. Not to mention greatly increased cleaning/sanitation in both the queues and for the rides/attractions themselves.

Do I think it can be done? Yes. But it is going to be a huge logistical challenge for Disney and many guests may not find it as enjoyable an experience as they are used to.

 

[DisneyDoctor]

Disney could be on point to opening on June 1st. If the IMHE model is accurate. Granted it won’t be the parks...but under the 1st phase Disney Springs could open as long as they can guarantee social distancing in their stores and restaurants. Plus so could the resorts...our hotels are still opened in Wisconsin as that is considered an essential business. Just might need to lower the prices quite a bit. Depends what Disney would want to do.

I think Florida needs to be cognizant of what WDW means to people literally around the world. No offense to Wisconsin, I lived their for 4 years and loved it, but people aren’t flocking to the same area from literally all corners of the US. This fact alone makes opening WDW so tricky. Even if they did only open the resorts and Disney Springs so many people from all over will come and share bugs. Normally that’s an accepted fate that no one really cares about, but in the setting of a pandemic it needs to be taken heavily.

 

[Kristoff]

I don’t see how that would work. Let’s say I get to MK at 10am and book a boarding group for Splash Mountain but I didn’t arrive at rope drop so I‘m in boarding group 60 and they are on 10 right now. If BGs on all rides and I can only do 1 boarding group at a time then I just have to wait around until my group is called. Let’s say that happens at 3PM. So now I’ve been in the park 5 hours and haven’t ridden a ride. After I ride Splash and all seems right with the world I go to book another boarding group and all of the headliners are gone for the day. I could probably get one for another ride or 2 but it’s not going to be possible to do a lot of rides in a day.

I think boarding groups could work for a select few rides but it would be messy for all rides. The other question is do they still allow FP+? If so that means very limited boarding group capacity.

If they go the route of boarding pass for all, I think it's almost mandatory to allow multiple at one time, in effect replacing FP+, the only difference being that you need to be in the park to get in the queue. Just doing it for one or two headliners makes no sense from a safety perspective. Let's say you go on 10 rides all with 20 minutes wait for a total of 200 minutes waiting with other people. Let's say you then do a boarding group for one attraction that usually has an hour wait. So you ended up saving 60 minutes out of 260 minutes total, so you effectively only reduced your exposure by roughly 23% doing the boarding group approach for a single headliner attraction. It seems like a lot of time, money, and effort to modify the existing system for the other three parks for very little gain from a safety perspective. If they did it for four or five headliner attractions (at a time) you would see that number approaches 50% total reduction which sounds better for guest safety

 

[GoofGoof]

If they go the route of boarding pass for all, I think it's almost mandatory to allow multiple at one time, in effect replacing FP+, the only difference being that you need to be in the park to get in the queue. Just doing it for one or two headliners makes no sense from a safety perspective. Let's say you go on 10 rides all with 20 minutes wait for a total of 200 minutes waiting with other people. Let's say you then do a boarding group for one attraction that usually has an hour wait. So you ended up saving 60 minutes out of 260 minutes total, so you effectively only reduced your exposure by roughly 23% doing the boarding group approach for a single headliner attraction. It seems like a lot of time, money, and effort to modify the existing system for the other three parks for very little gain from a safety perspective. If they did it for four or five headliner attractions (at a time) you would see that number approaches 50% total reduction which sounds better for guest safety

If attendance is way down most rides will be a walk on to less than 10 min wait. You could also limit people to 1 ride per day on each ride which would make lines even shorter. If attendance is high enough that most rides would naturally have 20+ min waits there’s no longer enough capacity to make boarding groups work. That’s the dilemma. Even with boarding groups or FP+ the lines will be 5 to 10 mins for a lot of rides when you return. There’s no way to avoid lines altogether.

 

[Polkadotdress]

Everyone suggesting social distancing for the attraction queues has failed to remember that many of those queues switch back, up and down the length of the queue, so that although there might be 6 feet between the parties standing successively in line, there is NOT 6 feet between the party next to you in the corresponding switchback queue.

Nightmare to redesign!

 

[DisneyCane]

I don’t see how that would work. Let’s say I get to MK at 10am and book a boarding group for Splash Mountain but I didn’t arrive at rope drop so I‘m in boarding group 60 and they are on 10 right now. If BGs on all rides and I can only do 1 boarding group at a time then I just have to wait around until my group is called. Let’s say that happens at 3PM. So now I’ve been in the park 5 hours and haven’t ridden a ride. After I ride Splash and all seems right with the world I go to book another boarding group and all of the headliners are gone for the day. I could probably get one for another ride or 2 but it’s not going to be possible to do a lot of rides in a day.

I think boarding groups could work for a select few rides but it would be messy for all rides. The other question is do they still allow FP+? If so that means very limited boarding group capacity.

Boarding group would have to work like old fastpass, not like RotR. Just without any standby line.

 

[GoofGoof]

Everyone suggesting social distancing for the attraction queues has failed to remember that many of those queues switch back, up and down the length of the queue, so that although there might be 6 feet between the parties standing successively in line, there is NOT 6 feet between the party next to you in the corresponding switchback queue.

Nightmare to redesign!

They will have to redesign if they want to open sooner than later. Maybe close every other row or more. There was a suggestion that they would eliminate all indoor queue areas and replace with temporary outdoor lines which seems impractical and hot as heck in the summer.

 

[GoofGoof]

Boarding group would have to work like old fastpass, not like RotR. Just without any standby line.

That would work better. Disneyland is already halfway there. Just need some temporary FP machines added. WDW would take a lot longer since the old machines are gone. Also they could just let people walk on if there’s no wait. As soon as a line forms they turn on the machine for FPs.

 

[Andrew C]

 

[Patcheslee]

So turn off fastpass temporarily and do boarding groups for everything. You can only join one boarding group at a time.

I could see alot of resort guests having issues with no FP. Part of the perks is FP priority, without it alot will expect compensation of some type.

 

[lazyboy97o]

This is where I think Fastpass is going to hurt them. Before Fastpass, the non-tier A rides might have a 20 or 30-minute wait with relatively low crowds so controlling would be much easier. Now that everything is Fastpass, even the tier B or C rides get 40+ minute waits. Sure, you may not need to wait 2 hours in line with people on SDMT, but instead, you wait for 45 with people on PoC, which doesn't seem much safer. I almost think they need to do everything as a boarding group or significantly alter how people get in lines for non-boarding group attractions.

FastPass is the distraction, not the cause of increased waits and crowding. The cause is Disney deliberately straining capacity. They’ve now spent decades doing everything to maximize crowding and undoing that will be difficult.

Everyone suggesting social distancing for the attraction queues has failed to remember that many of those queues switch back, up and down the length of the queue, so that although there might be 6 feet between the parties standing successively in line, there is NOT 6 feet between the party next to you in the corresponding switchback queue.

Nightmare to redesign!

Many queues are already designed to be reconfigured for differing demands. Cutting railing wouldn’t be the hardest task to do if required.

 

[Kristoff]

If attendance is way down most rides will be a walk on to less than 10 min wait. You could also limit people to 1 ride per day on each ride which would make lines even shorter. If attendance is high enough that most rides would naturally have 20+ min waits there’s no longer enough capacity to make boarding groups work. That’s the dilemma. Even with boarding groups or FP+ the lines will be 5 to 10 mins for a lot of rides when you return. There’s no way to avoid lines altogether.

I agree, there is no way to avoid lines but you can try to minimize the customer's exposure risk. I think it is extremely optimistic to think you will ever see most rides with a 10-minute wait outside of a special ticketed event where they purposely limit capacity to somewhere below 50K people, which just isn't realistic on a normal day, or right when the park opens. In essence, as I mentioned above, they would either need to allow multiple boarding groups at a time or not even bother with the boarding groups and stick with FP+.

 

[Animaniac93-98]

Many queues are already designed to be reconfigured for differing demands. Cutting railing wouldn’t be the hardest task to do if required.

Or put tape on the ground, something Disney already does for crowd control.

 

[Josh Hendy]

Everyone suggesting social distancing for the attraction queues has failed to remember that many of those queues switch back, up and down the length of the queue, so that although there might be 6 feet between the parties standing successively in line, there is NOT 6 feet between the party next to you in the corresponding switchback queue.

Consider the ride vehicles. How many of them could hold more than 1 or two people who are 6 feet apart? I figure, Test Track - one per car. Pirates, Splash Mtn (WDW), IASW - 2 per boat. Most dark rides and coasters - one per car. And the cars are moving. If someone coughs or breathes a cloud of germs, the next car will move into the cloud before it can disperse.

 

[DisneyCane]

That would work better. Disneyland is already halfway there. Just need some temporary FP machines added. WDW would take a lot longer since the old machines are gone. Also they could just let people walk on if there’s no wait. As soon as a line forms they turn on the machine for FPs.

Bring the IT people back from furlough and do it through the app.

 

[zengoth]

Bring the IT people back from furlough and do it through the app.

I think the app is going to be mandatory (with or without magic band) for most park experiences. Besides FP, i can see mobile ordering as the only way to get food in the parks. They may even require shopping on the app and picking it up in a couple of designated places instead of opening all the stores.

 

[marni1971]

Consider the ride vehicles. How many of them could hold more than 1 or two people who are 6 feet apart? I figure, Test Track - one per car. Pirates, Splash Mtn (WDW), IASW - 2 per boat. Most dark rides and coasters - one per car. And the cars are moving. If someone coughs or breathes a cloud of germs, the next car will move into the cloud before it can disperse.

Same household groups can be grouped together.

 

[MattFrees71]

If attendance is way down most rides will be a walk on to less than 10 min wait. You could also limit people to 1 ride per day on each ride which would make lines even shorter. If attendance is high enough that most rides would naturally have 20+ min waits there’s no longer enough capacity to make boarding groups work. That’s the dilemma. Even with boarding groups or FP+ the lines will be 5 to 10 mins for a lot of rides when you return. There’s no way to avoid lines altogether.

Reprise of the old ticket system???

 

[hopemax]

It would also mean that the mortality rate is around 0.1% like the flu.

And, if it held true in the NYC metro area then 65% or more of the population has already been infected. Assuming there is immunity for some length of time, that area would be getting close to herd immunity even with a higher Ro.

That's the thing though, with "peer reviewed" research, now it's time to check the results against everything we know about COVID-19. I've been following the Seattle epidemiologists Twitter, and he had some things to say about this study. And he has colleagues who have some things to say about the study. One admitted that normally the peer review happens out of the spotlight, but now everyone is watching. Another mentioned that the worrisome part is that people will latch onto something and use it for their own agenda, or this thing that hasn't been peer reviewed will be taken as fact. The example they used was how people were already using this study to prove that COVID-19 is no worse than the flu. We've seen multiple statements of that in this thread, this one just was the latest.

These people understand all the inputs, and assumptions. I don't. What little I can tell, the areas of concern is that within the group of people they tested, there is some actual observed prevalence. Some actual percentage of people tested positive. The study says that it was 1.5%. They originally found people who responded to an online ad, which means the sample wasn't random, but self-selecting. But to extrapolate to the county population at large you have to apply a lot of weighting. Which is where they ended up with the 2.5%-4%. Apparently, in studies like this, that is a large change. Also, there was concern about the accuracy of the Stanford antibody test. This is still all new, and they are concerned with the number of potential false positives. One person had a bunch of charts I didn't quite follow, talking about confidence intervals, test sensitivity and basically, just those things could end up with a situation where the entire "positive" results are "false positives." Seattle guy talked about how the test sensitivity, if it is only slightly less accurate, the number of expected positives drops to 0 (while the observed positive is still 1.5%). Finally, others were talking the presumed mortality rate and looking at everywhere else and basically saying, "does this match?" And the answer is a resounding no. If the mortality rate for this is as low as this study would indicate, than far too many people have actually died. Observed data has to match up.

Their conclusions is that this study can really only say the prevalence is "low." But the result that 50-80 times the number of infections...there is no way. Seattle guy, thinks that it's more 10-20 times, fwiw.

Here's the link to the actual study, so people can read what is being said in the comments

COVID-19 Antibody Seroprevalence in Santa Clara County, California

Background Addressing COVID-19 is a pressing health and social concern. To date, many epidemic projections and policies addressing COVID-19 have been designed without seroprevalence data to inform epidemic parameters. We measured the seroprevalence of antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 in Santa Clara...

www.medrxiv.org

And here is the link to the Seattle epidemiologist's Twitter in case anyone is interested in going down that rabbit hole

Trevor Bedford (@trvrb) | Twitter

The latest Tweets from Trevor Bedford (@trvrb). Scientist @fredhutch, studying viruses, evolution and immunity. Collection of #COVID19 threads here: https://t.co/Yc4fun5rcp. Seattle, WA

twitter.com

I do not plan on posting / responding, but with the number of "see, it's no worse than flu" comments, I thought it was important to point out that the peers reviewing, are concerned with the accuracy of the conclusion. So *WE* should not get too excited and use it as proof that things aren't so bad after all.