Me too!!! 
Yes. I am fairly confident the resort will be open for our trip at the end of July but am anxiously awaiting more detail on how the parks plans to reopen before I get super excited about actually going.
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True. But we have already decided that if Disney is a no go, we will still go down to Florida, rent a really nice house, and focus on Universal. It is our backup backup backup plan. 
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I have something similar. I have a friend (well, former customer) with a house in Florida. I stayed there during my first two trips in 2017 and 2018. It’s beautiful. Very relaxing. If it comes to it I could just stay there for a week.
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Is anyone going to test a subset of guests or team members that were there after park opening to see if procedures were enough?
My dream reopening procedure would be:
- Open one park for one day
- Make it exclusive for Florida residents over 18 and under 65 who declare not to have any pre-existing conditions nor live with someone in an at risk group
- Distribute tickets on a lottery system, having a guest group and a control group
- Track what each guest does while in the park (Magic band style)
- One week after the opening day, test both groups to compare covid prevalence
- Do the same thing with team members
If covid prevalence is not significantly different, reopen. Else, look for behaviour patterns to identify hot spots. Repeat removing the more dangerous activities until covid prevalence is not that different.
Never going to happen, but it would be nice.
I do hope they plan on testing at least a random sunset of employees. If not, considering incubation periods, it might take a couple of weeks to notice that something is not as safe as expected.
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Just FYI, Governor DeSantis will be holding Covid-19 press conference at 11AM EDT
I am sure that the re-opening of Universal will be a topic covered.
Orange County Mayor Jerry Demings was on CNBC last night stating that he was approving the plan and would send it onto the Governor on Friday morning.
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That sort of assumes they would keep things closed or scaled back if there was significant increased spread. I haven’t followed the Florida briefings close enough to know the exact mindset in their leadership.
When pressed if there were criteria that, if met, would cause re-closures in Texas, our governor said there were two contingency plans. The first was to increase surge capacity at hospitals. The second was to limit medical procedures to free up hospital space. So basically, we are taking some precautions to slow spread, but he accepts widespread infection as long as the hospital system capacity can meet it.
I suspect Florida governor is in a similar mindset from what I have heard.
I would much prefer your approach of balancing risk vs reward. Beyond the mortalities, the utter disregard for the long term health damage to many of the hospitalizations that “recover” is stomach churning for me. “Recovered” just means tests negative for Covid. A friend was telling me about a friend of hers in his 20s that was perfectly healthy and will now be on dialysis the rest of his life.
I don’t think they have any kind of handle on those statistics yet. Yes, the risk to a healthy individual is low, but when you start to run the infection through thousands and thousands of people, the statistics catch up with you as a society.
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Well, I love EPCOT for all the things - Soarin, Living with the land, (the tequila 
), World showcase in general. We are similar to Ryan1 in that we can live without the parades, meet n’ greets, and fireworks, we will wear the masks etc. but I think we would be on the fence with one or more of the parks being closed. Because ya, how do you fill the 6 days with park hopper tickets if one or more park closed? However, our trip is in December 2020. We’ll drive if we can’t fly from Canada. The thing is, we booked through David’s so unless we got an official full closure from WDW, I think we’d be out of pocket for the one bedroom at Boardwalk 
$$$. We have insurance but I don’t think we would be able to make a claim if Disney wasn’t officially and completely closed at the time of our trip. My partner thinks that we will be in the midst of a second wave of the pandemic by September but who knows…I’m trying to be optimistic. But yah, I think our breaking point would be the ride closures. (Even though after three days, I have to start popping anti- nausea medication because I get motion sick… 
)
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End of July for me as well. If Disney isn’t far enough along for us and UOR is (which, with teens, we basically love equally to WDW), I think we are coming around to the idea of keeping our flight (that must be used in 2020) and time off from work and just doing UOR+beach and saving the significant chunk we have tied up in gift cards for a future trip when Disney is much more normal. Still hoping for WDW as planned, but it feels like a lot of the pressure is gone now with another (seemingly) feasible backup option.
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That is a nice backup for you! Mine are younger so UOA isn’t a good alternative for us. It stinks they don’t have many options for younger kids because my older two loved Harry Potter. I want to take all 4 but am waiting on the younger two to hit 48”. 
I have a room only res and a trip planned for May ‘21 so (worse case) we’ll cancel the room and use the money paid for tickets for that May trip.
You will probably have noticed by now that I keep grasping at any potential positive side.
There have been studies showing that people take covid way more seriously after someone they know gets hospitalized, regardless of previous belief or political affiliation.
Now, my hope is: after opening up, there will be enough people changing their behavior on their own to avoid an explosion in cases. And as cases increase, more people see covid as a serious thread and change their behavior as well, and maybe that is enough.
I would definitely prefer if the government were involved. The incubation period is long and exponential functions are weird (it takes the same amount of time to go from 1 case to 1000 than it takes to from 1000 to 1000000), so by the time you feel how bad things are, things will be worse than they needed to be. And parsing through all this new information without guidance is really difficult, so having professionals you can trust setting safety guidelines would also be great.
But to be honest, one of my main worries with the lack of government action is the effect on small business. When stay-at-home orders are in place, everything is closed and small business have leverage to negotiate rent, utilities, mortgages, taxes (since everyone is in this together). Without stay-at-home orders many small business will fail to stay afloat (razor thin margins, decrease capacity and reduced consumer spending (in Sweden consumer spending fell 25%, without lockdowns)), but they won’t have as much leverage to negotiate (as some larger business will manage to profit, and will be able to take the whole market). Which is worrying to me, but it is nowhere close as worrying as millions of deaths.
I am incredibly hopeful that people will be careful once they see the effects, that by then we will already know which activities are the most dangerous and that this will happen soon enough that millions of deaths won’t happen.
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This! The only people close to me that have (presumably) had COVID-19 are having a tough time recovering and they had “mild” cases. It is weeks if not months later and they are still fatigued, coughing, occasionally feverish, etc. Maybe because I work in HR, but I have been thinking about the impacts to work productivity as more of the work force gets sick and then struggles for so long to really get well. And this is not even touching on those who are seriously ill and need hopsitalization/ventilators.
My friend who had it (presumably - didn’t qualify for testing here) is so thankful she’s working from home and on a 10% furlough. She works every day for as long as she can, then naps (sometimes for 5 hours!) then works a little more in the evening. She would not be able to go into the office for 40 hours a week at this point. And it’s been over a month and a mild case.
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@Shmebulock, I don’t know if the quarantine rules will help your case, but I would be calling Disney again and arguing you could not self-isolate on return. They may well announce a change of policy as a result, I would hope so anyway.
And yes, it applies to UK residents returning from holidays - in case anyone was wondering.
And …
The Foreign Office is still advising against non-essential travel, and that is not changing either. Given all that, Disney needs to change it’s policy NOW. 
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Do you teach English as a second language to Americans? 
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That’s a very good point. And that was with my very low end figure of .2%!
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There is a mid 40’s female in our area that was told her lungs may never recover full function. Very scary!
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They seemed to have updated their US language too to suggest people should contact them if you want to cancel.
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Is there anything to read from the tea leaves of this statement, or is this more of a “We know Universal is opening soon and you’re getting impatient with us. Please hold on a little longer while we finish figuring out how and when to take your money while offering you a reduced experience” kind of statement that really doesn’t say anything we didn’t already know?
The U.K. one hasn’t changed yet. Soon, hopefully.