Coronavirus and Walt Disney World general discussion

[hopemax]

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.

Ticket books! Bring back the ticket books!

 

[The Mom]

Same household groups can be grouped together.

Exactly. No need to stay 6 ft apart on a ride if you're sharing the same hotel room. Or, in many cases, the same bed.

 

[DisneyDebRob]

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.

Wonderful post with some excellent sources and great points. Thank you!

 

[GoofGoof]

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+.

The social distancing won’t last forever. I do think they should limit park capacity similar to a special event. Some days it will happen naturally but when it doesn’t they should limit it for sure.

 

[DisneyDebRob]

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

Would be the easiest thing to do, just hope it works better then my local grocery store.

 

[Animaniac93-98]

Would be the easiest thing to do, just hope it works better then my local grocery store.

Not Disney's fault if people don't want to follow guidelines.

 

[DKampy]

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.

Probably more than you think...it would not be any different then having a get away at a beach resort and with people just wanting to get out I could see it happening...especially your pixie dusters who want the magic anyway they can get it. I have stayed at Disney resort without ever stepping in a park... and this was before anyone knew what a covid19 was.

 

[DisneyDebRob]

Not Disney's fault if people don't want to follow guidelines.

Not saying it would be.

 

[DisneyCane]

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.

You don't need to distance PEOPLE, you need to distance PARTIES. For TT, for example, a family of 4 can all go in one car.

As far as coughing or sneezing, masks would cover the cough or sneeze automatically.

As far as an uncovered cough or sneeze, it won't create a static cloud. The droplets are accelerated relative to the motion of the person who coughs or sneezes. Them there will be some turbulent effect and counter force from the onrushing air. More turbulence will occur when the sneezer and their ride vehicle encounters the cloud.

I don't know exactly what the cloud will look like. Maybe someone has access to computational fluid dynamics software to simulate it. I do know that it won't look like what you are picturing (an airplane flying into a cloud).

 

[OrlandoRising]

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.

My day job is reporting on health misinformation. Public access to preprint research, meaning before it is peer-reviewed, is a very new concept in medical research, and the pandemic has exposed potential flaws in publicizing what are essentially first drafts.

Now take the Santa Clara study. The news coverage I read of it did responsibly disclose that the study hasn't been peer-reviewed, but there are questions peer reviewers would ask that could potentially change the conclusions. What was the false positive rate with the antibody tests? Was it truly a random sample? If people who had reason to think they had COVID-19 were more likely to volunteer, that injects bias into the sample.

There's an obvious demand for rapid access to COVID-19 research during these times, but we should all be careful about jumping to conclusions based on preprint studies.

 

[ImperfectPixie]

My day job is reporting on health misinformation. Public access to preprint research, meaning before it is peer-reviewed, is a very new concept in medical research, and the pandemic has exposed potential flaws in publicizing what are essentially first drafts.

Now take the Santa Clara study. The news coverage I read of it did responsibly disclose that the study hasn't been peer-reviewed, but there are questions peer reviewers would ask that could potentially change the conclusions. What was the false positive rate with the antibody tests? Was it truly a random sample? If people who had reason to think they had COVID-19 were more likely to volunteer, that injects bias into the sample.

There's an obvious demand for rapid access to COVID-19 research during these times, but we should all be careful about jumping to conclusions based on preprint studies.

You must be EXTRAORDINARLY busy right now.

 

[UNCgolf]

My day job is reporting on health misinformation. Public access to preprint research, meaning before it is peer-reviewed, is a very new concept in medical research, and the pandemic has exposed potential flaws in publicizing what are essentially first drafts.

Now take the Santa Clara study. The news coverage I read of it did responsibly disclose that the study hasn't been peer-reviewed, but there are questions peer reviewers would ask that could potentially change the conclusions. What was the false positive rate with the antibody tests? Was it truly a random sample? If people who had reason to think they had COVID-19 were more likely to volunteer, that injects bias into the sample.

There's an obvious demand for rapid access to COVID-19 research during these times, but we should all be careful about jumping to conclusions based on preprint studies.

I honestly didn't think the study showed anything we couldn't already reasonably assume. Perhaps not at the scale (50-85x is likely too high), but it's been readily apparent for months that the death rate is lower than it currently seems and the number of infected is much higher. That was a conclusion you could draw going back to some of South Korea's testing results.

The problem, as someone else said, is people taking this information and manipulating it to push an agenda. "The death rate isn't that much worse than the flu; this isn't a big deal!" Just because the first part of that statement may be true doesn't mean the second is also true. There are too many other variables at play, including the rate of infection and the corresponding potential to overwhelm health care facilities, which then cascades into lack of care for numerous other issues totally unrelated to Covid-19.

Even if the death rate was ultimately the same as the seasonal flu, it wouldn't make this any less serious in the short-term.

 

[DisneyDebRob]

I honestly didn't think the study showed anything we couldn't already reasonably assume. Perhaps not at the scale (50-85x is likely too high), but it's been readily apparent for months that the death rate is lower than it currently seems and the number of infected is much higher. That was a conclusion you could draw going back to some of South Korea's testing results.

The problem, as someone else said, is people taking this information and manipulating it to push an agenda. "The death rate isn't that much worse than the flu; this isn't a big deal!" Just because the first part of that statement may be true doesn't mean the second is also true. There are too many other variables at play, including the rate of infection and the corresponding potential to overwhelm health care facilities, which then cascades into lack of care for numerous other issues totally unrelated to Covid-19.

Even if the death rate was ultimately the same as the seasonal flu, it wouldn't make this any less serious in the short-term.

I believe that’s the exact thing that happens in any study.. manipulate it to that persons point of view or agenda that they want to push. Peer review is always essential in weeding out a lot of that.

 

[Jrb1979]

I honestly didn't think the study showed anything we couldn't already reasonably assume. Perhaps not at the scale (50-85x is likely too high), but it's been readily apparent for months that the death rate is lower than it currently seems and the number of infected is much higher. That was a conclusion you could draw going back to some of South Korea's testing results.

The problem, as someone else said, is people taking this information and manipulating it to push an agenda. "The death rate isn't that much worse than the flu; this isn't a big deal!" Just because the first part of that statement may be true doesn't mean the second is also true. There are too many other variables at play, including the rate of infection and the corresponding potential to overwhelm health care facilities, which then cascades into lack of care for numerous other issues totally unrelated to Covid-19.

Even if the death rate was ultimately the same as the seasonal flu, it wouldn't make this any less serious in the short-term.

We need to stop focusing so much on the deaths and more on how sick it makes a lot of people. My wife has it so I know first hand how much this virus affects people. She has a hard time breathing and just walking to the bathroom she is out of breath. But yes lets open up Disney cause I need my magic fix.

 

[UNCgolf]

We need to stop focusing so much on the deaths and more on how sick it makes a lot of people. My wife has it so I know first hand how much this virus affects people. She has a hard time breathing and just walking to the bathroom she is out of breath. But yes lets open up Disney cause I need my magic fix.

Exactly, this is another major point people are ignoring.

One of the largest pork facilities in the United States is currently shut down -- not by government order, but because too much of their staff is infected and are too sick to work.

 

[Tom P.]

Same household groups can be grouped together.

Exactly. No need to stay 6 ft apart on a ride if you're sharing the same hotel room. Or, in many cases, the same bed.

So people being people... how long before folks start pretending to be part of the same household to get on the ride faster?

 

[DisneyDebRob]

Exactly, this is another major point people are ignoring.

One of the largest pork facilities in the United States is currently shut down -- not by government order, but because too much of their staff is infected and are too sick to work.

Smithfield’s. The videos of the workers in plants like that are scary. Basically working on top of each other, as workers complained about the situation. I just hope that other plants have adjusted somehow.

Smithfield Foods closes two more plants

Pork processor Smithfield Foods is temporarily closing two more plants, one in Cudahy, Wis., and one in Martin City, Mo., due to the coronavirus pandemic.Both plants have a small number of employee…

www.google.com

 

[Club Cooloholic]

The social distancing won’t last forever. I do think they should limit park capacity similar to a special event. Some days it will happen naturally but when it doesn’t they should limit it for sure.

10,000 people vs. 60,000 will not keep people safe and will not be worth it to Disney to open. They make their money on food, merchandise and the like, not on people riding rides.

 

[Lilofan]

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

Most of IT staff at Disney got outsourced and works in India.

 

[note2001]

Maybe Disney Springs could open first. The resorts could be OK except for elevators. Maybe the low rise resorts open first. The parks themselves are tough. Especially Disney where even the coasters are indoors. An amusement park where most things are outside would be easier if they space out the lines for rides and food stands. I still think if they follow the suggestion of no groups over 50 you can’t open WDW parks.

Elevators... good point.

Just thinking out loud: Some resort buildings are built with more open staircases than others and should not have an issue (the values, moderates, OKW, SSR, certain floors at other deluxe resorts. Otherwise there will need to be one family group per elevator signs put up. This will be an issue at the Contemporary which has always had elevator issues as it was.

I just read an article on Sun Sentinel that claims Florida has had this virus running rampant way longer than was originally thought. There were exceptionally high pneumonia deaths reported this flu season and many may have been covid. That could explain why Florida is peaking so early. On the plus side I’m hoping this means that the hot spots like New York and possibly Florida wouldn’t get hit as heavy if a second wave comes.

Influenza B was out and about this year and mimicked COVID-19 very close. It caused major breathing issues with folks who've never had trouble with it before. My daughter had it exactly as COVID-19 was ramping up around here and came close to needing hospitalization back in March.