News: Cedar Fair preparing for another pandemic-focused season in 2021

I'm just hoping rides will be filled to capacity next season and no need for access passes. If airlines are filling planes in an enclosed space, I don't understand why they can't fill all rows on an outdoor ride. Maybe still don't pair single riders, just seat every row.

Jeff said:

mgou58 said:

...drop in the bucket... I’m just stating basic facts

But you weren't... you were stating a misunderstanding of how trials work. You could have Googled "statistical significance" and understood what I was talking about almost instantly.

Jeff I’ve known of you long enough to know that it’s not worth my time to engage in a debate with you over interpretation of communication. So I’ll leave it alone. This thread has actually been fairly constructive so far even without your recent comments so I’m happy to discuss further with others.

Moving along; I agree with recent comments that there is no difference between filling a plane and filling a train on a ride. Although, according to the airlines they use filtration systems that have been “proven to kill the covid virus” though I can’t personally attest to that claim.

There is a huge difference between filling an airplane to capacity and filling a roller coaster train to capacity--

You spend less than five minutes in the coaster train.
You might spend all day in the airplane seat.

(actually, the seats on most coasters are wider than standard coach airline seats, and a lot of coaster seats have more legroom. Even on Arrow mine trains.)

So, yeah, if it's OK to cram full an airplane, a roller coaster should be as safe or safer, from a viral transmission perspective. Plus, the real danger points are in the waiting areas. Fully loading the trains reduces the time spent waiting, which further mitigates viral transmission risk.

--Dave Althoff, Jr.

I think we have discussed this before (I know I brought it up somewhere else), but so very little was known at the time, and there was so much debate about what was being allowed to open (to the point of Cedar Point threatening to sue), that the park 1) came up with a comprehensive plan that 2) had to get approved by the state, and 3) the opening was contingent on the park following those plans, no matter how silly or needless any of us think those guidelines and regulations were.

Based on what science has told us about the virus, the two aspects of the plan that would seem to make the least sense now would be a) the every-other-row seating on rides/coasters, and b) the once an hour (or whatever it was) "deep cleans" of the ride vehicles.

I would imagine the park is 1) working on an updated plan to open in the spring, 2) that like last year this will need to be approved, and 3) that the park is doing everything they can to improve on the guest experience, which would mean eliminating any protocols what diminished that while also keeping the bar of safety/health as high as possible.

Now is the time so slap some sense into your aunt/mom/grandpa anti-vaxxer.

What about what the Golden State Warriors are doing? Mandatory negative tests for attending fans? In order to get in you take a rapid test and if it’s negative you’re good to go. Obviously very very expensive but I could see major theme parks exploring this. What if there was a cheap enough test that CF could use in its parks? Is this a viable option?

That plan was rejected by San Francisco's health department.

Regardless of whether it was rejected or not doesn’t change the question I asked. Not to mention California has basically been shut down for the entire year anyways. My question was, and not based on one state, is this a viable option? Maybe not right now but as tests become cheaper and more accessible could theme parks use these?

Could they? Sure. Will they? I strongly doubt it. As vaccines roll out in the next months, the population's immunity will grow at a much faster rate, and the public will likely have less reservations about returning, even with less protocols. As Kevin said, the park will likely be doing whatever the state requires them to do in order to open, and I don't think that a rapid test will be the most practical way to align to those requirements.

And rapid tests are known to be less accurate.

https://www.healthline.com/health-news/fast-isnt-always-better-expe...19-testing

https://www.bmj.com/company/newsroom/accuracy-of-rapid-covid-test-m...suggested/

^^ Which is exactly why it was rejected, and rejected quickly, by the health department.

I am looking at the bright side; it's my hope that come May we are also looking at a drastically different landscape. We will be on the other side of this thing; not "over", but well on the way and, quite possibly, nearly there. I would fully expect that the park is planning on having a relatively normal late summer and a Halloweekends-like-no-other.

It will not make up for another lousy Spring/Early Summer, but the tide should be turning.

With normality on the horizon, I don't think it would be worth the time and/or investment.

I'm optimistic for next year. Consider this: Back in March we were clocking 350 cases a day* and it was an absolute disaster. Everything closed. Everything stopped until we could get a handle on what we were dealing with. As infections continued to pile up (but fortunately deaths didn't), and we realized this would be a longer-term event, we made changes, and we started to get back to work. Now, we're averaging 7,700 new cases a day* and life goes on. Think about that a moment: nine months ago, 300 cases a day was a public health emergency; today 7,700 new cases a day somehow doesn't feel as severe. And yet, looking at the numbers, quite clearly there's more of an emergency now than there was in march, right?

Well, no. Back in March, the novel coronavirus looked like a death sentence. Now it looks like COVID-19 is not nearly so scary. It's a whole range from a bad flu to something more like pneumonia to something that can, but most likely won't, kill you. We've learned that this is something we *can* kind of live with. We're getting a better idea about what's dangerous and what isn't, what mitigations are useful and which ones are not, although our political leaders don't seem to have figured it out yet. And of course now we have a vaccine.

A lot can happen in the next few months. Regardless of what you read in the news, here in Ohio the most recent new case peak was on December 4 with a daily average new case count of 9,717. Of course the data since then is incomplete, but it's slowly falling. What the next season looks like is going to be driven not by the number of people who are vaccinated, it's going to be determined by what the case numbers and hospitalization numbers are actually doing when the time comes around. Because that's what is going to drive the political decision making. Right now, things are pretty rough. But an inflection point seems to be building that looks very promising.

Of course that's with the caveat that the last time we had a pattern like this was back in August, when it looked like this thing would burn out in November, and we all know how that worked out, so you have reason not to agree with me.

--Dave Althoff, Jr.

* Working from onset-adjusted numbers supplied to the public by the Ohio Department of Health. As usual I am working strictly from Ohio numbers.

--DCAjr

Case in point Dave; Pfizer released a statement tonight stating they have millions of vaccine doses sitting in warehouses with no further delivery instructions from the federal government. Furthermore, a few states have been informed this evening that their vaccine allotment will be reduced. So there’s doses sitting in warehouses and no one knows why. These are the kind of issues that will continue to arise so long as this thing remains a political subject , which it shouldn’t be.

Edit: because I know how fast some of you like to shoot things down, here’s a link.

https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/530716-two-governors-say-c...ssion=true

Are you really suggesting that a total supply chain failure means there isn't really a problem? For real?

"Scary" and fear has nothing to do with anything, Dave. It's cosmically stupid to be like, "I'm not scared of this!" I'm not scared of busses either, but I'm careful not to step in front of them when they're moving. The problem with armchair experts declaring it all as "no big deal" because the odds that they don't understand appear relatively low ignores a number of important things:

• It's only "no big deal" if in fact it doesn't kill you or hospitalize you. Depending on where you live and the health demographics of that locale, somewhere between 1 in 7 and 1 in 4 people who test positive require hospital care.
• When so many people land in the hospital, the availability of care for everything else is reduced. There are only so many rooms, doctors and nurses, and right now, the system is at its limit in many places, and we haven't even peaked.
• The economic damage of having so many people sick is at least as bad, if not worse, than closing businesses. Unemployment is trending up again.
• The "long hauler" phenomenon doesn't have consistent definition, but a non-trivial portion of people infected have symptoms exceeding two weeks, with many going for months. Survival isn't simple.
• Infection makes you a transmission vector to others, and exponential spread is why the "odds" people like to quote lack context. Odds of being infected are relative to the overall community spread.

I'm not optimistic at all when people are still trying to make "no big deal" arguments to justify apathy.

Chris Christie has come out pretty strong now pushing masks...to the chagrin of the President, I'm sure. If he is to be believed he was wearing masks from the beginning. He went to the White House on four consecutive days, each time taking a rapid test that said he was negative before being allowed in. He attended meetings with 6 or 7 others...all of whom also tested negative with the rapid test.

All but one person who attended those meetings contracted Covid. Christie ended up in the hospital and had some scary days.

So no, I don't give much credence to the idea that rapid testing people before they do anything is really a mechanism to defend against contracting the virus.

I don't recall anyone saying rapid tests were a silver bullet. Other than a vaccine (and even that won't be 100% effective particularly depending on the number of people who get it and until recently we didn't have one and now that we have a couple there still are logistical issues of distribution which will take many months), there is no silver bullet. Multiple approaches that help combined with other approaches and all combined still not 100% effective.

Rapid tests are not 100% accurate (there are false positives and negatives). And people also can shed the virus before testing positive on a rapid test. But knowing more people have the virus earlier is still very helpful. Particularly given cold/flu season with many symptoms similar to covid and with limited tolerance/ability to isolate.

Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

I'm just going to pop in here and update the numbers I have been following with a few statistics on the progression of the SARS-CoV2 epidemic in Ohio, same data source I have been citing all along, all the usual caveats, etc. Note also that the data I am using has been adjusted so that each case is pegged to the onset of symptoms or if that isn't known, to the testing date, which differs from the reporting date potentially by two weeks or more. Why today? I'm getting to that...

Based on today's data (12/26/2020), and using a 7-day trailing average daily case count, Ohio's 7-day average daily case count peaked on 12/04 at 9,968 infections per day. Today's 7-day case average is 3,748 but because of reporting delays that number can't be trusted. The latest number we can trust is probably 12/12 when the daily average was 8,657. Our peak date both for new cases (13,253) and hospitalizations (435) was November 30. Numbers are falling, but they are falling slowly.

Of greater interest to this discussion are the total infection numbers. 664,668 total cases represents approximately 6.0424% of the State population. If my WAG of a 70% undercount is even close that means just today the total infection count in Ohio just crossed 2.2 million...now 20% of the State population. Using the same calculation we were at 10% on November 13. 10% in the first 316 days, the next 10% in 43 days. That the infection rate is falling is nice, but doesn't change the fact that we are *rapidly* infecting lots of hosts. Not as fast as a month ago, but still a whole lot faster than we were in August. That we hit 20% is why I bring it up today. I'll bring it up again when we hit another nice round number.

Vaccination right now is catching up. In the last 12 days, Ohio started vaccinations on 50,000 people as 60,000 people were infected by the virus. But if the trends keep up as they are, vaccinations will be outpacing infections shortly if the supply can keep up. Depending on how fast the infections fall and how fast the vaccines get delivered, we could see that immune host count past 40% in the next month. I've seen estimates that the epidemic is likely to burn out at about 60%-70%.

And yes, I would much rather see it happen through vaccination than through infection. Either way, that's how we get a better season in 2021.

--Dave Althoff, Jr.

One thing is for sure...there are going to be a percentage of the people who no matter what will visit Cedar Point. For those who forgo flying, if you draw a circle around Cedar Point and factor in a 4-hour drive window, there are an estimated 60 million people in that circle. If they market and execute well, they will have no issues. Look at the stock price....it's a good bet and far off the bottoms of gloom & doom

Knott’s Berry Farm is now extending season passes into 2022.

https://www.knotts.com/park-update?fbclid=IwAR3ayesKA1TmSP9gG9UK2sb...x1U-We_j4U

Smart move for Knotts since Disneyland cancelled their Annual Pass program.

Disneyland has been mumbling about doing away with their annual pass program for some time. From reports I have been hearing, it was beginning to cost them money.