Coronavirus and Walt Disney World general discussion

[John park hopper]

According to the IHME model, by June 1 in FL there will be 0 daily deaths and 0 patients on ventilators.

The same model projects single digit deaths in the USA by June 1 and less than 80 Americans on ventilators.

IF the model verifies, I would imagine the pressure to reopen things will increase tremendously each day thereafter. WDW may be one of the last things to reopen, but at least the conditions will be more fertile for that kind of talk once malls, schools, little league, etc reopen.

Let's hope that model is correct

 

[thomas998]

According to the IHME model, by June 1 in FL there will be 0 daily deaths and 0 patients on ventilators.

The same model projects single digit deaths in the USA by June 1 and less than 80 Americans on ventilators.

IF the model verifies, I would imagine the pressure to reopen things will increase tremendously each day thereafter. WDW may be one of the last things to reopen, but at least the conditions will be more fertile for that kind of talk once malls, schools, little league, etc reopen.

There is however one big problem with the IHME model. If you look at the projections from it is using the classic normal shaped curver where the infections and deaths start to drop at the same rate they appeared. That really flies in the face of reality. Go look at graphs for Italy which further along than the US. They have pretty much peaked about 10 days ago but they aren't seeing a nice drop the way the models predicted. Instead they have been at an almost static level. Other scientists have also noted that it is wishful thinking to believe that we will come down from the peak just as rapidly as we went up to the peak. Mostly because we were never on a strict quarantine with everyone locked up instead we have only been in a quasi-quarantine which never was intended to actually stop the spread it was only intended to slow the spread. If your only slowing the spread and not stopping the spread then all you will be doing is lowering the peak but if you lower the peak happens and the spread is allowed to continue which it has. Then you will eventually end up with the same number of infections that you would have had if you did nothing and the only way that you could really graph that is to look at your original number infected if you did nothing and then determine how long you need tl hold the peak out until a gradual drop would give you the same number infected.

The chart below give a better picture of what I'm talking about. Just remember this was the Spanish flu and the main difference was that Philadelphia had a big parade that they didn't cancel and St Louis canceled the parades and tried to get people to avoid large groups. You notice that the only time the drop from the peak was really as rapid as its rise was when you did nothing... if you try to slow the spread but never stop it you get more of the St. Louis shape where it strings along the plauteu of the outbreak with the biggest peak coming just after the Thanksgiving season where lots of people would have likely said forget this I'm seeing grandma... and then you see the deaths pick up again.

 

[Sirwalterraleigh]

Job opening pre Corona pandemic. That's a fancy title for "restructuring and consolidation" specialist.

Is that to fire people! Oohhh...pick me!...I can do it!

And It was re-posted yesterday. Yes, I know exactly what it means. We will start to see Iger start to lay off people like Jack Welch/ GE.

I made the case there’s a void since neuron Jack croaked a couple weeks ago on a thread...
Seriously though...Disney is going to slash and burn the employee ranks like a Brazilian rainforest...and people will make tons of CC level Econ class excuses for them...

Get your popcorn.

 

[marni1971]

There is however one big problem with the IHME model.

That it’s a model?

 

[Sirwalterraleigh]

According to the IHME model, by June 1 in FL there will be 0 daily deaths and 0 patients on ventilators.

The same model projects single digit deaths in the USA by June 1 and less than 80 Americans on ventilators.

IF the model verifies, I would imagine the pressure to reopen things will increase tremendously each day thereafter. WDW may be one of the last things to reopen, but at least the conditions will be more fertile for that kind of talk once malls, schools, little league, etc reopen.

Problem is that Florida isn’t where the money comes from....


Unless Disney plans on operating as a non-profit from now on?

 

[GoofGoof]

According to the IHME model, by June 1 in FL there will be 0 daily deaths and 0 patients on ventilators.

The same model projects single digit deaths in the USA by June 1 and less than 80 Americans on ventilators.

IF the model verifies, I would imagine the pressure to reopen things will increase tremendously each day thereafter. WDW may be one of the last things to reopen, but at least the conditions will be more fertile for that kind of talk once malls, schools, little league, etc reopen.

I agree with this. WDW along with professional sports with in stadium fans should be among the last things to re-open. If most states reach phase 3 by the end of the summer and schools start going back in the fall it should open the door for WDW and other similar large group settings. That’s assuming a large second wave hasn’t popped up by then.

 

[thomas998]

Is that to fire people! Oohhh...pick me!...I can do it!

I made the case there’s a void since neuron Jack croaked a couple weeks ago on a thread...
Seriously though...Disney is going to slash and burn the employee ranks like a Brazilian rainforest...and people will make tons of CC level Econ class excuses for them...

Get your popcorn.

Reminds me of the Cheer episode where Norm becomes the corporate axe man... is that your goal? To bring terror to employees from them simply seeing your number on the caller ID?

 

[DisneyDebRob]

HIV comes to mind. We have neither a vaccine or a cure, but it isn't a death sentence anymore, either.
But there are still new cases despite decades of "safe sex" warnings. Some people will still act selfishly if given a choice between what they should do, and what they want to do. Even when they know the danger involved - both to themselves, and others.

The biggest difference between the two is we have control for the most part over HIV. We can have safe sex..avoid dirty needles if you use drugs and for the most part blood transfusions are a lot safer today then back in the 80’s.
With this we are depending on the next guy taking precautions so we don’t get it. I myself don’t like relying on someone else so my health stays good.
But as you say, some will act selfishly and we need to just be prepared as best as possible.

 

[lilypgirl]

There is however one big problem with the IHME model. If you look at the projections from it is using the classic normal shaped curver where the infections and deaths start to drop at the same rate they appeared. That really flies in the face of reality. Go look at graphs for Italy which further along than the US. They have pretty much peaked about 10 days ago but they aren't seeing a nice drop the way the models predicted. Instead they have been at an almost static level. Other scientists have also noted that it is wishful thinking to believe that we will come down from the peak just as rapidly as we went up to the peak. Mostly because we were never on a strict quarantine with everyone locked up instead we have only been in a quasi-quarantine which never was intended to actually stop the spread it was only intended to slow the spread. If your only slowing the spread and not stopping the spread then all you will be doing is lowering the peak but if you lower the peak happens and the spread is allowed to continue which it has. Then you will eventually end up with the same number of infections that you would have had if you did nothing and the only way that you could really graph that is to look at your original number infected if you did nothing and then determine how long you need tl hold the peak out until a gradual drop would give you the same number infected.

The chart below give a better picture of what I'm talking about. Just remember this was the Spanish flu and the main difference was that Philadelphia had a big parade that they didn't cancel and St Louis canceled the parades and tried to get people to avoid large groups. You notice that the only time the drop from the peak was really as rapid as its rise was when you did nothing... if you try to slow the spread but never stop it you get more of the St. Louis shape where it strings along the plauteu of the outbreak with the biggest peak coming just after the Thanksgiving season where lots of people would have likely said forget this I'm seeing grandma... and then you see the deaths pick up again.

View attachment 464768

I will be honest I don't get the comparing of an infectious disease outbreak from a 102 years ago versus today. I feel like that is comparing apples to oranges at this point. They are so many different variables now in terms of health care , technology, living conditions etc .......

 

[DisneyCane]

This 3-D Simulation Shows Why Social Distancing Is So Important (Published 2020)

We visualized a cough to show how far respiratory droplets can spread. If you haven’t been keeping your distance to fight the coronavirus, this may persuade you.

www.nytimes.com

It's a nice animation/simulation but it doesn't attempt to simulate the fluid dynamics involved when somebody coughs or sneezes on a moving ride. It will also be different for a slow moving omnimover vs. a roller coaster.

 

[thomas998]

I will be honest I don't get the comparing of an infectious disease outbreak from a 102 years ago versus today. I feel like that is comparing apples to oranges at this point. They are so many different variables now in terms of health care , technology, living conditions etc .......

Actually the two pandemic have some things that are very much the same. Neither one was treatable and neither one had any vaccine available to stop it. If you want to dwell into the way they killed people they both killed a large number of victims from cytokine storms where the bodies of the victims had gone into hyperdriver on the immune response causing their bodies to basically kill themselves. The only really big difference in the viruses beyond them being different was that the Spanish Flu tended to kill more young healthy people whereas the coronavirus tends to kill unhealthy people and older people more often. But my point is simply to show the charts which show that the number of people dead wasn't much different overall it was just a matter of one city spread the death out over a much longer period and that is what we are doing with social distancing so we are going to suffer with a prolonged time of deaths and infections much like in the chart.

 

[MisterPenguin]

According to the IHME model, by June 1 in FL there will be 0 daily deaths and 0 patients on ventilators.

The model assumes no change in behavior. That if in a lockdown, the lockdown continues until there is no more spread. We know that that will not be the case.

 

[DisneyCane]

The corona virus being an RNA virus tends to mutate faster than a DNA virus which makes it little more difficult to develop a vaccine. The flu virus is also a RNA virus and every year they take there best guess as to what strain will be most prevalent when developing a vaccine. Even so 80,000 people die from the flu. As the corona virus goes through the human population those that survive develop antibodies (hopefully some degree of immunity). Once a vaccine is developed just like the flu you will be vaccinated for the most prevalent strain of cover-19 each year. Just like the flu there will still be many deaths which it seems we have come to accept. An HIV a vaccine has not been developed seems the virus outsmarts the vaccine by mutating. Hopefully cover-19 won't do that. As Mom posted there is no HIV cure but drugs have been developed so people can live with it. Though there is a high death rate

The reason for no HIV vaccine is not because it keeps mutating. It is because it attacks the immune system directly and "hides itself" from the immune system. No known human has ever contracted HIV and rid themselves of the virus. Some don't develop AIDS but the virus is still there. A vaccine "trains" the immune system to produce antibodies to destroy the virus. If the immune system can't do that on its own then a vaccine in the traditional sense can't work.

The direction they have gone with HIV is to create drugs that can intercept the virus upon entering the body and prevent it from infecting cells. Simplistically, that is the concept of the PREP drugs that have been advertised a lot lately. It isn't a vaccine in the traditional sense because you have to keep taking the drug for it to work vs. some period of immunity with an actual vaccine.

With the SARS-CoV-2 virus, the issue isn't really an inability of the immune system to fight it off. It's more of an issue of developing severe or fatal symptoms before the immune system has fought it off. If a therapeutic drug was found or developed that could help fight the virus off twice as fast there would be a very significant decrease in significant illness and death.

 

[The Mom]

I will be honest I don't get the comparing of an infectious disease outbreak from a 102 years ago versus today. I feel like that is comparing apples to oranges at this point. They are so many different variables now in terms of health care , technology, living conditions etc .......

But Mother Nature doesn't care that we are more technologically evolved. I'm sure people in 1918 were saying the same thing - we can't compare this with earlier epidemics/pandemics - we know so much more now and our lifestyle has evolved so much from 100 years ago!

 

[thomas998]

The reason for no HIV vaccine is not because it keeps mutating. It is because it attacks the immune system directly and "hides itself" from the immune system. No known human has ever contracted HIV and rid themselves of the virus. Some don't develop AIDS but the virus is still there. A vaccine "trains" the immune system to produce antibodies to destroy the virus. If the immune system can't do that on its own then a vaccine in the traditional sense can't work.

The direction they have gone with HIV is to create drugs that can intercept the virus upon entering the body and prevent it from infecting cells. Simplistically, that is the concept of the PREP drugs that have been advertised a lot lately. It isn't a vaccine in the traditional sense because you have to keep taking the drug for it to work vs. some period of immunity with an actual vaccine.

With the SARS-CoV-2 virus, the issue isn't really an inability of the immune system to fight it off. It's more of an issue of developing severe or fatal symptoms before the immune system has fought it off. If a therapeutic drug was found or developed that could help fight the virus off twice as fast there would be a very significant decrease in significant illness and death.

Actually there have been a patient rid of the virus, I can't recall the country but if memory serves me it was a cancer patient that underwent some radiation or chemo treatment that also resulted in him having to have a bone marrow transplant after his was destroyed by the cancer treatment. I believe it has been something like 5 years now and the HIV has not been detected even though he doesn't take any medications. Otherwise I agree, it seems a bit optimistic to think that we are going to have a vaccine by the end of the year as many people are claiming. If I could put money on a vaccine I would be betting against any vaccine by the end of the year and feel very confident of winning that bet.

 

[DisneyCane]

The model assumes no change in behavior. That if in a lockdown, the lockdown continues until there is no more spread. We know that that will not be the case.

The model assumes a lot of things. It also keeps changing based on data during a period where the assumed behavior has not changed.

The problem I see with the model is that not enough is actually known about how the virus spreads so the model is less of a simulation and more of trying to match a mathematical formula to observed reality. I think the reason it has been so inaccurate is that it doesn't take into account differences in geographical areas. It treats "Florida" as one entity when there are huge differences between cities and counties.

Just as the model was wrong about hospital resource usage, it is also likely wrong that if no change was made to behavior that there would be no deaths starting 5/23.

In the same way that the experts are saying that you can see the effect of mitigation because of how well we are doing compared to the models, once the reopening begins and there are deaths past 5/23 the experts will say, "see, you opened too early and now there is more death."

 

[Lilofan]

Actually there have been a patient rid of the virus, I can't recall the country but if memory serves me it was a cancer patient that underwent some radiation or chemo treatment that also resulted in him having to have a bone marrow transplant after his was destroyed by the cancer treatment. I believe it has been something like 5 years now and the HIV has not been detected even though he doesn't take any medications. Otherwise I agree, it seems a bit optimistic to think that we are going to have a vaccine by the end of the year as many people are claiming. If I could put money on a vaccine I would be betting against any vaccine by the end of the year and feel very confident of winning that bet.

Whoever discovers the covid vaccine will win the Nobel prize, that's for certain.

 

[DisneyCane]

Actually there have been a patient rid of the virus, I can't recall the country but if memory serves me it was a cancer patient that underwent some radiation or chemo treatment that also resulted in him having to have a bone marrow transplant after his was destroyed by the cancer treatment. I believe it has been something like 5 years now and the HIV has not been detected even though he doesn't take any medications. Otherwise I agree, it seems a bit optimistic to think that we are going to have a vaccine by the end of the year as many people are claiming. If I could put money on a vaccine I would be betting against any vaccine by the end of the year and feel very confident of winning that bet.

I definitely agree with you on that bet. Even for the best case scenario, the vaccines they started testing actually have to work. I'm confident that a vaccine will be developed but if the one that actually works isn't put into testing until June (just an arbitrary date), it will be at least July 2021 before it is widely available.

 

[GoofGoof]

Whoever discovers the covid vaccine will win the Nobel prize, that's for certain.

and even if it’s split 15 ways the companies backing the vaccines will make a small fortune. Well earned in my opinion.

 

[GoofGoof]

I definitely agree with you on that bet. Even for the best case scenario, the vaccines they started testing actually have to work. I'm confident that a vaccine will be developed but if the one that actually works isn't put into testing until June (just an arbitrary date), it will be at least July 2021 before it is widely available.

There are several in human trials already. No guarantee any of them is actually effective. If they are it could be a few months earlier, but still 2021. Best case scenario IMHO is a vaccine is ready for emergency use by the end of the year. I hope I’m wrong and a group like the Oxford one posted here earlier has a vaccine ready for emergency use by the fall. That would be great news.