UPDATE (3/12): Disneyland has announced that it will be closing for the remainder of the month, effective March 14. As of now, Disney World remains open. The original story follows below.
Even if the best thing for us to do right now is barricade ourselves inside our homes and stay there until COVID-19 goes away, it’s easy to understand that some folks need to be out and about—you might have to make a quick trip to the grocery store, or scuttle over to your significant other’s house. What’s more difficult to comprehend, however, are the thousands of people choosing to flood the gates of Disney World in the face of a global pandemic.
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Wait times at the theme park outside Orlando remain ridiculously long, meaning that families are flipping the bird to that whole “social distancing” thing and hanging out at a place where you spend your time standing in line inches away from other people, hugging the same characters hundreds of other people have hugged, and riding rollercoasters thousands of other people have ridden that very same day.
Greg Antonelle, the chief executive of a travel company that helps families plan trips to Disney resorts, told the New York Times he’s visited the Orlando parks every day for the past week and a half, and—even as the entirety of Italy has gone on lockdown, Trump has put a travel ban on flights from Europe, and cases in the US continue to skyrocket—the theme park is “as crowded as ever.”
“We’re not getting cancellations because of coronavirus and from being in the park, you wouldn’t know that anything is different,” he told the Times.
Oh good! These agents of chaos are just fully ignoring the fact that we’re in the midst of a public health crisis, blissfully having a goddamn blast zooming around on the Pirates of the Caribbean ride and hanging out in the Magic Kingdom. Never mind the fact that many of these Disney enthusiasts dragging their kids around are probably in the classic “parents” age range—say, early 30s to late 40s—and likely have their own elderly parents in the demographic particularly susceptible to COVID-19.
Who are these people? What’s going through their heads? How can they possibly justify a trip to a place where a reported average of about 50,000 people a day come in extremely close contact with one another? We’d need some kind of expansive sociological study to answer those questions—but the best we’ve got is a look inside the mind of Corey Higgins, a mother of two who talked to the Times about her trip to Disney World.
“Me and my husband have been monitoring things, but didn’t feel like we needed to cancel our plans,” she told the Times. “We have wipes, we have hand sanitizer, we aren’t elderly and honestly, if you’re going to get it, you’re going to get it. If I’m going to get sick and die, I might as well do it at Disney World.”
Incredible. For its part, Disney World insists that it’s taking extra steps to keep the park as sanitary as possible. It’s increased the number of hand sanitizing stations throughout the park, ramped up cleaning and disinfecting operations in “high guest contact areas,” and is providing “information about good hygiene practices and illness prevention” to its guests and employees.
“We are carefully monitoring the evolving coronavirus situation and are in regular contact with health agencies for information and guidance,” Disney Parks’ chief medical officer Pamela Hymel said in a statement. “We continue to implement preventive measures in line with the recommendations of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), as well as state and local health agencies.”
For now, both Disney World and Disneyland (out in California) are still open, and there’s no sign they’ll close any time soon. Excellent. We’re all fine! Everything’s gonna be fine.
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