Disneyland to Reopen July 17th Pending Approval
By George Robbins
Amusement parks have been shut down just as long as all other forms of public businesses, but will remain shut longer than most. At the start of the pandemic, one of the biggest concerns was that places with a lot more foot traffic would end up being the biggest source of infectious spread. This is how the spread of diseases, especially ones like the coronavirus, actually happens and so far places like those are reopening and creating more risk than necessary. Cases are even beginning to spike again following memorial day, and the US is currently the worst in the world in number of cases. This is why it is surprising that there is now an opening date for Disneyland in California.
California has been one of the states that has been holding out the longest in terms of reopening businesses. They have been strictly trying to keep the number of new cases from going back up, but also trying to keep up with the reopening of businesses to keep their economy from failing. This made it possible for a number of businesses to reopen their doors to the public, including theaters as of June 12th. This doesn’t change the fact that the virus is still a real threat and that it is now starting to make a strong resurgence. With that in mind, will things like amusement parks really even be able to reopen after all, or is it way too risky to open them back up amidst the chaos.
With the country full of protests at the moment, there is a dangerous amount of risk involving new cases cropping up. There is now telling how the next month or so will end up going, and we could even possibly see the pandemic ending up even worse than when it first began. If things get worse, we could only end up stuck where we are with no hope of things being better in the near future. All of the plans that have been in place to keep the infection from spreading during reopenings are going to soon become worthless. This means that businesses that have been allowed to reopen will not be able to stay opened for too much longer. The only way they were being allowed to stay opened recently was because of the drop in new cases.
Ultimately, places like Disneyland that wish to reopen within the next month may end up losing their chance to do so. The increase in positive cases could have states rescinding their original orders and people could end up in a worse off position than before. Disneyland in California has plans to reopen on July 17th to the public following guidelines similar to other parks regarding the virus. This plan for reopening their park is tenuous at best though since it will be up to the government to approve of the official plans to open up the gates to guests. So with the way things are currently going, we may just end up not seeing the park reopen anytime soon.