The happiest place on earth
has been closed for about 10 months,
and it probably won't be reopening anytime soon.
California isn't allowing theme parks to reopen
until the counties they're located in
have fewer than one COVID infection
per a hundred thousand residents for seven consecutive days.
The rate here in Orange County
currently exceeds that by about 90 fold.
We're gonna be stubborn about it,
California Governor Gavin Newsom said in October.
Newsom's stubbornness is one of a kind.
Every other Disney property in the world has reopened.
In California,
some of Disney's retail and dining is allowed to open,
but the rides and attractions remain closed.
The city of Anaheim meanwhile, looks like a ghost town.
The mouse provides 78,000 jobs
and is the center of the local economy.
Disney world in Orlando opened in July
as Florida's case rates were climbing.
The reopening amounts to a breathtaking effort
by a corporation to prove that it can safely operate
at a highly dangerous time,
the New York Times observed.
YouTubers created dark parodies of the reopening.
You don't belong here.
But the surge never came.
This is the tale of two Disneys
and two radically different approaches
to managing the COVID-19 pandemic.
You got a lot of people in your profession
who waxed poetically for weeks and weeks
about how Florida was gonna be just like New York.
Wait, two weeks, Florida's gonna be next.
Just like Italy, wait two weeks.
Well, hell we're eight weeks away from that,
and it hasn't happened.
The media savaged
Florida, governor Ron DeSantis
when he and a handful of Southern GOP governors
pushed to reopen most businesses in early summer of 2020.
DeSantis's strategy from the get go
had been to shield Florida's seniors
by issuing executive orders
to temporarily ban nursing home visitations
and prohibit readmission of COVID positive patients.
In contrast to New York governor Andrew Cuomo's order,
forcing nursing homes to accept COVID patients.
A couple months later with case rates falling,
National Review editor Rich Lowry asks,
Where does Ron DeSantis go to get his apology?
Then when cases surged over the summer,
Los Angeles Times columnist Michael Hiltzik
delivered on the requested apology.
Sorry, you're even worse than I imagined, he wrote.
But by the end of the summer
cases were falling in Florida
and rising in areas of the country
that were in full or partial lockdown.
California which had the nation's most stringent policies
related to COVID-19 began to experience
a massive second wave in November.
Florida was also seeing a spike in cases and deaths
though it was less severe.
While the California and Florida
approaches to COVID-19 were vastly different,
their outcomes began to look remarkably similar.
If some in the media had been too quick
to condemn DeSantis,
others had also been too quick
to declare victory for Newsom.
In April The Atlantic had extolled
California's dramatic success
in containing the Corona virus pandemic.
What's clear about the impact of Newsom's policies
is that they've taken a devastating toll
on working-class California residents.
The golden state shed eight percent of its jobs
compared to five percent in Florida.
It experienced the fifth highest drop in GDP
among U.S. States and a much higher drop in tax revenue.
California now has more total cases per capita
and is approaching Florida's total deaths per capita,
despite having a younger population.
California residents have been flouting the lockdowns
and challenging them in court.
A recall petition for Governor Newsom
has gathered more than three quarters
of the required 1.5 million signatures to make the ballot.
There are probably 50,000 people
in a three square mile that are out of work right now,
due to the restrictions placed by California's governor.
Here in Anaheim,
Fred Brown has been the general manager
of Desert Palms Hotel
in the literal shadow of Disneyland for 24 years.
So far, he's had to lay off 80 employees
including his own daughter.
If we don't have guests,
I don't know how long some of these hotel owners
are gonna be able to last without throwing in the towel
and going into bankruptcy.
I don't think the State of California
has done the best job keeping businesses afloat.
Mike Afram
shut down his shuttle company in March,
laid off a hundred employees
and has been unable to reopen since.
Well, unfortunately I think a lot
of small businesses related to the resort
or even unrelated to the resort
are not gonna survive,
or they won't come back.
This is a death knell for tens of thousands of jobs.
These are working class jobs
and hundreds of small businesses in and around the resort.
He's usurping precious freedoms away from the private sector
and increasing our residents and our workers
reliance on government just to get by.
Trevor O'Neil
is an Anaheim city council member.
He says tourism accounts
for almost a hundred million dollars
of annual tax revenue for Anaheim.
That goes a long way
to be able to fund our vital city services,
our public safety, our police and our fire,
our road repair.
Everything that a city has to do
and allows us to be able to keep our taxes
on our residents low.
Disney as a corporation has been very successful
in opening its parks around the world
and including the one in Florida,
and they have proven to know what they're doing
and know how to do it safely and securely.
So I don't see why it would be any different
for us here in California or in Anaheim.
Disney is known
for its expert handling of logistics
and the company drew widespread praise
when it brought back the NBA playoffs here in Florida,
by creating a so-called NBA bubble
that successfully prevented any players or staff
from COVID infection over a two month span.
California is also home to Universal Studios
and Six Flags,
in addition to smaller amusement parks
with no giant corporate backer
to float them through 10 months shut down.
The contrast between California and Florida
reflects growing evidence
that lockdowns are not an effective strategy
for managing a viral respiratory epidemic.
Our estimates show that lockdowns
have a really dramatic effect in reducing transmission.
A June, 2020 paper in Nature,
claimed that lockdowns would save
three to four million lives worldwide.
But it assumed without evidence
that slowing the spread was due to lockdowns
rather than voluntary behavior,
and that as lockdowns stretched on
they would remain just as effective
as in the early days of the pandemic.
After it was published places with stringent lockdowns,
including California, The United Kingdom,
and Italy experienced second waves.
A possible theory is that lockdowns become less effective
over time because the public grows weary
of the social isolation and starts gathering
in private households on a more frequent basis.
According to contact tracing data in New York,
74 percent of cases were contracted inside people's homes.
You've closed bars, you've closed restaurants
you've closed theaters, you've closed stadiums.
You've closed mass gatherings.
Where do people go?
They go home, come to my house.
Big city mayors
who promoted aggressive lockdowns
are beginning to change tack
even amidst large caseload's.
Chicago's Lori Lightfoot
and Washington D.C.'s Muriel Bowser
have pushed for reopening restaurants for indoor dining.
And San Francisco and L.A.'s mayors
have allowed outdoor dining to resume.
A January 5th study by a research team at Stanford
compared countries that shut down non-essential businesses
with ones that took less restrictive public health measures.
Like only banning large events
and discouraging international travel.
It found no evidence
that the more stringent lockdowns
contributed substantially
to bringing down the case rate.
Economist Lyman Stone told Reason in May of 2020
that his study of the lockdowns revealed no correlation
between the timing of a state
or nationwide stay at home order
and the spread of the virus.
So we have a couple of different data sources
that basically track your cell phone,
which is a little bit creepy.
And what we can see is that policy choices
like shelter-in-place orders
had almost no impact
on when people began to socially distance.
People were already socially distancing before the lockdown.
Social distancing works.
Stone's early findings
are consistent with the Stanford study,
which found that exposure to information
about the virus and its risks
was a stronger driver of anti-contagion behaviors
than the specific nature of the government restrictions.
Neither California's statewide restrictions
nor Florida's more laissez-faire approach
have proven effective at suppressing the virus,
but various Asian governments and Australia
have for now mostly accomplished that feat,
and not primarily through lockdowns.
For instance, the densely populated city of Hong Kong
has experienced fewer than 200 COVID deaths
out of a population that exceeds 7 million.
But authorities there imposed
only one short-lived lockdown
in a single neighborhood
experiencing outbreak in mid January.
Stone attributes the overall low case rates
to the city-state's aggressive travel restrictions
and targeted public health measures,
which were enacted early in the pandemic.
We should not hesitate
to pull the trigger on closing borders.
Second, mask early, mask often.
Everyone should wear a mask,
and they should do so as soon as you know
that you have a threat of a pandemic.
Information is the most powerful tool
for getting people to understand the risk
and protect themselves.
But after that, centralized quarantine.
Anyone who is a positive test
and any close contact of a positive test,
we need to isolate.
California governor Gavin Newsom
lifted his stay at home order on January 25th,
on the grounds ICU's will have the required capacity
in several weeks,
but the state has withheld some of the data
they used to make that projection.
Theme parks will remain closed.
In the meantime,
Disneyland has opened one of its parking lots
as Orange County's largest vaccination site.
So far, California has had one
of the slowest vaccine rollouts in the nation.
With the rollout of the vaccine,
which has not been proven to be the best rollout
compared to other states,
maybe there's a way
we can responsibly
sooner open up
so that we can get back to business
and get the back to surviving.