How can Disney World limit the spread of the virus? Even if everyone wore a mask I’d bet half the people who will be there are teens and kids who are much less aware of touching their faces, eyes, and nose.
So the question becomes… how much are Disneyworld and other theme parks going to spread infection?
Thinking about seats in rides, hand-railings, stuff that social distancing won’t impact. Since this is happening in Florida, it seems akin to setting of a biological attack. Am I over hyperbolizing?
Can you imagine being on a ride like a coaster and the person in the front seat has Covid but no symptoms and unless they make masks mandatory in the park, they are gonna be spitting covid in the air as they yell on the ride, spreading it to every other person on the ride.
What percentage of activity at Disney World is indoor versus outdoor? Is Disney fully opening indoor activities? There seems to be a growing scientific view that the beach is probably fine, for example, so long as you’re not shoulder to shoulder.
The US blew it’s lockdown, and probably needs another one done properly - across the board in my opinion, given the tendency to shirk under a nuanced regime. But I’m not sure outdoor activities at Disney are as risky to all of society as much of the other nonsense out there, if we’re stuck in this anti lockdown timeline. People still insist on shopping without masks, which puts everyone else at those sites (with only surgical masks or less) at risk.
The indoor vs. outdoor ratio isn’t what matters here so much, and the beach comparison isn’t very valid. You don’t have tens of thousands of people standing in lines with their hands on queue rails at the beach. Nor do they ride roller-coasters where inhaling the persons spittle from 4 cars ahead of you is going to happen.
So while you’re correct in that outdoor venues are less infectious, the very problem is theme parks entire business model is to cram as many people as they can into the smallest space possible. While there will limitations on attendance, and for outdoor shows you can force people to sit 6 feet apart… you’re talking about Florida people. So many of them don’t believe this is real or just don’t care. So if they’re given a mask they won’t wear them properly if at all. They’ll cram next to others regardless of rules.
If they don’t force people to wear masks on rides, that would be criminal.
I’m not convinced it’ll be a problem. As long as people wear their masks, and DW is serious about kicking people out not wearing them.
This is mostly based on a) parks being a mostly outdoor activity, 2) the lack of spikes we’ve seen attributed to the protests and gatherings a few weeks back - and we’re far enough out from them that we should have seen big spikes by now if we were going to see them. Not to mention the lack of spreading (0%) in Springfield at that hair salon with two employees actually symptomatic, but everyone wore masks.
Restaurants may still be an issue, as you have to take off the mask to eat/drink. But outside from that, I’ll wait and see what happens. Certainly, the next month or so will influence whether we still go down there in late October (for Food and Wine, which was a trip planned before any of this started). We’ll certainly cancel if need be, but I’m hopeful that if people just keep their damn masks on, it’ll be fine.
I live here. It’s 95 degrees right now with a “Feels Like” of 101. So at the very least drinking is not going to be isolated to restaurants and so people are going to have to constantly be taking their mask off to keep hydrated.
Not to mention a lot of the lines have fans to keep people cool, which will blow around any particles that people might spread around in their times without the masks on.
The way Disney is structured is prime for spread. Universal Studios has already re-opened and there are pretty legitimate reports from people I know of employees getting tested positive for the past week all around.
Yesterday alone Orange County (County Disney is officially in) had 1k new cases
I can’t imagine Disneyland could be any worse than the pictures of open beaches I have seen in Florida and England. And Disney has always done a pretty good job of keeping them clean. So with reduced crowds, masks and extra cleaning it shouldn’t be any worse than a visit to the grocery store in most places.
I went to Disney’s site and watched a video on their restrictions and precautions. They do look good. But the problem is going to be the visitors themselves. Not sure how many of them will be running with the mask around the necks and Disney’s tolerance for that. With a high concentration of kids, who you can’t control from touching their faces (mask or not), it’s going to be easy to shed their viral castings all over, especially on handrails.
(Looks up Universal’s re-opening date) We’re seeing it now. Universal re-opened on June 3rd. And of course FL has been racking up new record numbers of daily Covid-19 cases all this week.
(Not that all of FL’s record numbers are due to amusement parks, mind, just being reopen in general.)
We agree that masks are important and should be mandatory. And the so far Floridians haven’t shown themselves very diligent, on average, if left to their own discretion.
I still don’t see Disney World as a make or break opening, the straw that breaks the camels back of R0 >1, etc.
Florida is such a basket case it probably makes very little impact. Seal the whole state off and let it burn as long as the citizens there let it…
We probably need more evidence of theme parks where there is a lower level of community spread, just to suss out the true differences, but both outdoor and surface transmission have been called into question by scientists in the last week, which somewhat in the same realm as theme parks.
