Coronavirus and Walt Disney World general discussion

[LaughingGravy]

"At will" employment means there is no legal trouble; you can be fired for a good reason, a bad reason or no reason at all unless you fall into a protected class. The older employees you are referring to are in a class that is protected against discrimination based on age.

They are not as protected as you think. If there is a clear pattern of letting those of a certain age go, especially in a group, then yes. If they are culled from the payroll slowly enough and with varied reasons, it it very difficult to bring a case against the offending company.

 

[lewisc]

I read the description of what's still not allowed under red. Sounds like going from an F to a D-. A small improvement

 

[Polkadotdress]

There seems to be a bit of funny business going on with the FL numbers, which is not-at-all surprising.

https://www.miamiherald.com/news/coronavirus/article253796898.html

 

[Chi84]

They are not as protected as you think. If there is a clear pattern of letting those of a certain age go, especially in a group, then yes. If they are culled from the payroll slowly enough and with varied reasons, it it very difficult to bring a case against the offending company.

My point was that if a person is an at-will employee and not in a protected class, the employer can fire them without incurring liability. I expressed no opinion on the ease or difficulty of bringing an age discrimination case.

 

[havoc315]

https://www.miamiherald.com/news/coronavirus/article253796898.html

Florida playing with their death numbers… making it look like deaths are declining….

 

[JoeCamel]

There seems to be a bit of funny business going on with the FL numbers, which is not-at-all surprising.

https://www.miamiherald.com/news/coronavirus/article253796898.html

https://www.miamiherald.com/news/coronavirus/article253796898.html

Florida playing with their death numbers… making it look like deaths are declining….

Yes, I'm surprised it took the Herald this long to run a story on it. We knew they were cooking the books at the start of the month when they announced the change. Nikki Fried (Ag commissioner) called them out before it happened.

 

[Vegas Disney Fan]

"At will" employment means there is no legal trouble; you can be fired for a good reason, a bad reason or no reason at all unless you fall into a protected class. The older employees you are referring to are in a class that is protected against discrimination based on age.

We are a union house but our handbook is as thick as a phonebook, if management wants to find a reason to get rid of someone it’s not difficult, all with the necessary paperwork and escalating disciplinary action required by our union contract.

In places where community spread is low enough and proper distancing is possible and practical it’s possible that masks in schools would not be needed. We were prepared to start our school year with masks optional for all students when our case numbers were 0.5 per 100K people and our percent positive was well below 1%. Then delta came and that changed everything. Our district pivoted to masks for all students and is evaluating additional mitigations. The key is the ability to be flexible and pivot. It’s tragic that so many people think of covid in only linear terms. Once masks were dropped they think they should never come back. It’s foolish and short sighted. It’s proven that masks aren’t perfect or even highly effective, but they clearly are much better than nothing. For lack of a better option kids should be wearing masks in school. I’d rather have them all vaccinated and cases way down, but that’s not the reality we live in.

This is exactly why I hate the one size fits all approach created by statewide mandates, whether they are too lenient or too strict. Let the local areas decide, what’s needed in a 50,000 person town will be different from in a 5 million person metro area, or in a 1% positive rate vs a 20% positive rate.

any btw...who said Canadians can't be rude??

My girlfriend is Canadian… they can be downright vicious sometimes.

 

[Disney Analyst]

We are a union house but our handbook is as thick as a phonebook, if management wants to find a reason to get rid of someone it’s not difficult, all with the necessary paperwork and escalating disciplinary action required by our union contract.



This is exactly why I hate the one size fits all approach created by statewide mandates, whether they are too lenient or too strict. Let the local areas decide, what’s needed in a 50,000 person town will be different from in a 5 million person metro area, or in a 1% positive rate vs a 20% positive rate.



My girlfriend is Canadian… they can be downright vicious sometimes.

We are just very passive aggressive.

 

[Disney Analyst]

Another incredible Vice News piece.

 

[BuddyThomas]

Another incredible Vice News piece.

I hope the mods don't mistakenly think this is political and delete it. This is something everyone should see.

 

[Patcheslee]

Almost a month into school and cases are rising. Just for curiosity, I compared our county positive cases to all the schools in our county reporting cases from the Indiana site. 3 schools do not report, the remaining do. 24% of the positive cases in the last 30 days are students, that doesn't include teachers or staff. A majority is from middle and high schools. We've been in session since August 8th, so not even a month yet. Still no mask requirement, distancing, etc. No communication from the schools. DD12 says there are kids out in her classes but doesn't know if covid positive or just close contact.

 

[DisneyDave71]

Yes, I'm surprised it took the Herald this long to run a story on it. We knew they were cooking the books at the start of the month when they announced the change. Nikki Fried (Ag commissioner) called them out before it happened.

https://www.miamiherald.com/news/coronavirus/article253796898.html

Florida playing with their death numbers… making it look like deaths are declining….o

Looking at the CDC Covid tracker (https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#cases_casesper100klast7days…) there is a good explanation. Here is the notation of disclosure for the data. Florida is reporting "date of death" instead the date the death was reported to the health department.

 

[DisneyCane]

https://www.miamiherald.com/news/coronavirus/article253796898.html

Florida playing with their death numbers… making it look like deaths are declining….

Yes, I'm surprised it took the Herald this long to run a story on it. We knew they were cooking the books at the start of the month when they announced the change. Nikki Fried (Ag commissioner) called them out before it happened.

Enough with the "cooking the books" or "playing with numbers" narrative. Reporting deaths based on the date of occurrence is accurate and shows the impact of each spike accurately. It just takes a few weeks for "the numbers" to show up in the chart. Charting them based on report date is inaccurate. Doing it that way makes it look like an issue is still ongoing when the spike has subsided.

If 500 deaths are reported today but 480 of them died in July, why would it be better to report today as 500? All it does is stand out as "worse" on a daily report.

The severity of the current outbreak is best illustrated by the data on hospitalizations which are reported in real time. Not to veer into politics but there is a reason that the Commissioner of Agriculture is the one who "called them out" and it isn't selfless and altruistic.

 

[drizgirl]

Enough with the "cooking the books" or "playing with numbers" narrative. Reporting deaths based on the date of occurrence is accurate and shows the impact of each spike accurately. It just takes a few weeks for "the numbers" to show up in the chart. Charting them based on report date is inaccurate. Doing it that way makes it look like an issue is still ongoing when the spike has subsided.

If 500 deaths are reported today but 480 of them died in July, why would it be better to report today as 500? All it does is stand out as "worse" on a daily report.

The severity of the current outbreak is best illustrated by the data on hospitalizations which are reported in real time. Not to veer into politics but there is a reason that the Commissioner of Agriculture is the one who "called them out" and it isn't selfless and altruistic.

Cooking the books has gone on. Just might not be the state everyone wants to talk about.

 

[Touchdown]

Enough with the "cooking the books" or "playing with numbers" narrative. Reporting deaths based on the date of occurrence is accurate and shows the impact of each spike accurately. It just takes a few weeks for "the numbers" to show up in the chart. Charting them based on report date is inaccurate. Doing it that way makes it look like an issue is still ongoing when the spike has subsided.

If 500 deaths are reported today but 480 of them died in July, why would it be better to report today as 500? All it does is stand out as "worse" on a daily report.

The severity of the current outbreak is best illustrated by the data on hospitalizations which are reported in real time. Not to veer into politics but there is a reason that the Commissioner of Agriculture is the one who "called them out" and it isn't selfless and altruistic.

If they had done this since the beginning, sure but switching midway through? That’s fishey. Basically, I know FL is cooking it’s case numbers and deaths now so I can’t really trust them. Thankfully, you can’t cook hospitalizations and they are going down so I’m still planning to come later this fall. In another month late August on this graph is going to look terrible due to back reporting. There is no reason the Florida case curve has this extremely high plateau. Someone is delaying reporting on further new cases from the last 2-3 weeks to avoid the bad press. I expect a major “correction” in 2-4 weeks after it’s clear cases are down trending.

I expect the death curve to look wonky like this later this fall too, before an adjustment around Christmas to show the real, typical bell curve.

 

[DisneyCane]

If they had done this since the beginning, sure but switching midway through? That’s fishey. Basically, I know FL is cooking it’s case numbers and deaths now so I can’t really trust them. Thankfully, you can’t cook hospitalizations and they are going down so I’m still planning to come later this fall. In another month late August on this graph is going to look terrible due to back reporting. There is no reason the Florida case curve has this extremely high plateau. Someone is delaying reporting on further new cases from the last 2-3 weeks to avoid the bad press. I expect a major “correction” in 2-4 weeks after it’s clear cases are down trending.

View attachment 583883
I expect the death curve to look wonky like this later this fall too, before an adjustment around Christmas to show the real, typical bell curve.

The reason the case curve hit a plateau like it did is because the positivity is too high to be capturing the real number of cases. Said another way, not enough tests are being done. If there were lets say 4 times the tests being done, the positivity would be well under 10% and the curve would get to a peak instead of being chopped off in a plateau.

It has nothing to do with delaying reporting and everything to do with just not enough testing. I expect a couple of weeks of relatively slow decline as the positivity drops. When the positivity gets under 8% or so, then the cases will start to drop quickly because a much higher percentage will be getting found.

I'll bet a week's worth of Genie+ and maximum IAS that the case curve will not be backfilled.

It has

 

[DisneyFan32]

If they had done this since the beginning, sure but switching midway through? That’s fishey. Basically, I know FL is cooking it’s case numbers and deaths now so I can’t really trust them. Thankfully, you can’t cook hospitalizations and they are going down so I’m still planning to come later this fall. In another month late August on this graph is going to look terrible due to back reporting. There is no reason the Florida case curve has this extremely high plateau. Someone is delaying reporting on further new cases from the last 2-3 weeks to avoid the bad press. I expect a major “correction” in 2-4 weeks after it’s clear cases are down trending.

View attachment 583883
I expect the death curve to look wonky like this later this fall too, before an adjustment around Christmas to show the real, typical bell curve.

is this Christmas will be much better than last year? Is the wave will be ending by early 2022 or mid 2022?

 

[Touchdown]

The reason the case curve hit a plateau like it did is because the positivity is too high to be capturing the real number of cases. Said another way, not enough tests are being done. If there were lets say 4 times the tests being done, the positivity would be well under 10% and the curve would get to a peak instead of being chopped off in a plateau.

It has nothing to do with delaying reporting and everything to do with just not enough testing. I expect a couple of weeks of relatively slow decline as the positivity drops. When the positivity gets under 8% or so, then the cases will start to drop quickly because a much higher percentage will be getting found.

I'll bet a week's worth of Genie+ and maximum IAS that the case curve will not be backfilled.

It has

I would expect a much higher spike in %positivity if that were true.

 

[DisneyCane]

View attachment 583885
I would expect a much higher spike in %positivity if that were true.

Why? You reach a point where a certain percentage of people with enough symptoms to bother getting tested have COVID.

What gets missed is the mild cases and asymptomatic cases. As the spike gets less severe, more people with lesser symptoms bother to get tested because it isn't as inconvenient. Also, a higher percentage of cases get contact traced so the contacts that didn't catch it get tested in larger numbers.

 

[mmascari]

I would expect a much higher spike in %positivity if that were true.

Eh, the current value is pretty bad. They generally use above 5% as bad, below as better, and somewhere under 2.5% as good. In the 15%-20% range, the stats are practically useless for knowing the true total cases.

I'll bet a week's worth of Genie+ and maximum IAS that the case curve will not be backfilled.

How much backfill to collect?

I saved the CDC data set when it was through 08/22/2021 and again when it was through 08/30/2021 for both cases and deaths. Both of them have backfilled data for dates prior to 8/22/2021, but it's not equivalent for the two metrics.

Based on the differences, the death lag is really obvious. Basically, looking at the daily death charts today on 9/1/21, all the data through 8/1/21 isn't changing much anymore, just one or two here and there. All the data from 8/1/21 through 8/30/21 is very different between the two death data sets in a meaningful way. So, we can look at the daily death charts, but only as of 30 days in the past not through today. People have been saying that for ages through, it's why the last 2 weeks on the death chart always looks like a huge decline.

For the case chart, it was backfilled too, but the delta between the data sets was net 96 cases between 1/23/20 and 8/22/21. Some days up, some down, with the max additional 66 cases one day. There must have been a lot of days reduced too, since when I did this between 8/25 and 8/22, the 8/25 data set had 582 extra cases vs the 8/22 set. None of these numbers are different enough to make a material change to the curve shape. They're spread out over enough time, they can barely even shift the entire curve up and down. Compared to the total cases over the entire span of time, it's barely anything. But, compared to looking at just the latest daily new number, some days it is a significant amount.

So, there is a backfill happening, even on cases.
It's doesn't look large enough to change the curve shape.
It may have a slight impact on the curve height, but not huge. At least not between data sets a week apart.
It does hide some data in the past. Enough that the most current daily number is probably misleading.
I'll need to wait for the CDC to publish FL data through 9/22/21 before I can compare the data through 8/22/21 on what's known a month apart instead of a just a week to see how it holds up then.

Based on that so far, you may have technically lost the bet, but not in the spirit of of having a meaningful historic impact. I don't think anyone could collect it from you, yet.