Disney World reopens, Florida coronavirus outbreak

Part of the Disney World amusement park reopened on Saturday in Orlando, after four months of closure, against the backdrop of a rapid acceleration of the pandemic in Florida, which registers thousands of new cases of coronavirus every day. There were several hundred queuing on Saturday morning before the opening of the Magic Kingdom, one of the two spaces to once again welcome the public with the Animal Kingdom.

The futuristic theme park EPCOT and the Hollywood Studios park are set to follow suit from Wednesday, in a gigantic ensemble that is twice the size of Manhattan. All the visitors present on Saturday had reserved their tickets, to allow Disney to control the number of people in the park and make physical distancing possible. There are already no tickets available for a visit in July.

A criticized decision

The entertainment giant has set up an important system to take into account the risks of the spread of the coronavirus. Provision was thus made for systematic temperature taking at the entrance, wearing a mandatory mask, the ubiquity of hydroalcoholic gel dispensers and the minimum spacing of two meters in each attraction or inside the shops. Disney launched a barrier awareness campaign using the characters from the movie “The Incredibles”.

On social networks, many criticized the decision to reopen the park while Florida is experiencing an acceleration of the pandemic. The state of the southeast of the United States recorded 10,383 new cases during the last 24 hours, not far from the absolute record recorded on July 4 (11,458), and 95 new deaths.

Republican Governor Ron DeSantis had decided to begin containment as of May 4, before most states in the country. On Thursday, the director of the American Institute of Infectious Diseases, Anthony Fauci, publicly estimated that Florida had come out of containment before all the indicators of public health were green. Ron DeSantis disputed this diagnosis, saying that his decision was justified by the contamination figures of the time. At the end of June, the governor went back and ordered the bars to be closed in an attempt to limit the spread of the virus, but the contamination figures nevertheless continued to escalate.