 The happiest place on earth has been closed for about 10 months, and it probably won't be reopening anytime soon. California isn't allowing theme parks to reopen until the counties they're located in have fewer than one COVID infection per 100,000 residents for seven consecutive days. The rate here in Orange County currently exceeds that by about 90-fold. We're going to be stubborn about it, California Governor Gavin Newsom said in October. Newsom's stubbornness is one of a kind. The other Disney property in the world has reopened. In California, some of Disney's retail and dining is allowed to open, but the rides and attractions remain closed. The city of Anaheim, meanwhile, looks like a ghost town. The mouse provides 78,000 jobs and is the center of the local economy. Disney World in Orlando opened in July, as Florida's case rates were climbing. The reopening amounts to a breathtaking effort by a corporation to prove that it can safely operate at a highly dangerous time. As the New York Times observed, YouTubers created dark parodies of the reopening. But the surge never came. This is the tale of two Disney's and two radically different approaches to managing the COVID-19 pandemic. You got a lot of people in your profession who waxed poetically for weeks and weeks about how Florida was going to be just like New York. Wait two weeks. Florida's going to be next. Just like Italy. Wait two weeks. Well, hell, we're eight weeks away from that. The media savaged Florida Governor Ron DeSantis when he and a handful of Southern GOP governors pushed to reopen most businesses in early summer of 2020. DeSantis's strategy from the get-go had been to shield Florida's seniors by issuing executive orders to temporarily ban nursing home visitations and prohibit readmission of COVID-positive patients. In contrast to New York Governor Andrew Cuomo's order forcing nursing homes to accept COVID patients. A couple months later with case rates falling, National Review Editor Rich Lowry asked, Where does Ron DeSantis go to get his apology? Then when cases surged over the summer, Los Angeles Times columnist Michael Hilsik delivered on the requested apology. Sorry, you're even worse than I imagined, he wrote. But by the end of the summer, cases were falling in Florida and rising in areas of the country that were in full or partial lockdown. California, which had the nation's most stringent policies related to COVID-19, began to experience a massive second wave in November. Florida was also seeing a spike in cases and deaths, though it was less severe. While the California and Florida approaches to COVID-19 were vastly different, their outcomes began to look remarkably similar. If some in the media had been too quick to condemn DeSantis, others had also been too quick to declare victory for Newsom. In April, the Atlantic had extolled California's dramatic success in containing the coronavirus pandemic. What's clear about the impact of Newsom's policies is that they've taken a devastating toll on working-class California residents. The Golden State shed 8% of its jobs compared to 5% in Florida. It experienced the fifth highest drop in GDP among U.S. states and a much higher drop in tax revenue. California now has more total cases per capita and is approaching Florida's total deaths per capita despite having a younger population. California residents have been flouting the lockdowns and challenging them in court. A recall petition for Governor Newsom has gathered more than three quarters of the required 1.5 million signatures to make the ballot. There are probably 50,000 people in a three square mile that are out of work right now due to the restrictions placed by California's governor. Here in Anaheim, Fred Brown has been the general manager of Desert Palms Hotel in the literal shadow of Disneyland for 24 years. So far, he's had to lay off 80 employees, including his own daughter. If we don't have guests, I don't know how long some of these hotel owners are going to be able to last without throwing in the towel and going into bankruptcy. I don't think the state of California has done the best job keeping businesses afloat. Mike Afrom shut down his shuttle company in March, laid off 100 employees and has been unable to reopen since. Well, unfortunately, I think a lot of small businesses related to the resort or even unrelated to the resort are not going to survive, but they won't come back. This is a death knell for tens of thousands of jobs. These are working class jobs and hundreds of small businesses in and around the resort. He's asserting precious freedoms away from the private sector and increasing our residents and our workers' reliance on government just to get by. Trevor O'Neill is an Anaheim City Council member. He says tourism accounts for almost $100 million of annual tax revenue for Anaheim. That goes a long way to be able to fund our vital city services, our public safety, our police and our fire, our road repair, everything that a city has to do and allows us to be able to keep our taxes on our residents low. Disneyland as a corporation has been very successful in opening its parks around the world and including the one in Florida and they have proven to know what they're doing and know how to do it safely and securely. So I don't see why it would be any different for us here in California or in Anaheim. Disney is known for its expert handling of logistics and the company drew widespread praise when it brought back the NBA playoffs here in Florida by creating a so-called NBA bubble that successfully prevented any players or staff from COVID infection over a two month span. California is also home to Universal Studios and Six Flags in addition to smaller amusement parks with no giant corporate backer to float them through a 10 month shutdown. The contrast between California and Florida reflects growing evidence that lockdowns are not an effective strategy for managing a viral respiratory epidemic. Our estimates show that lockdown has a really dramatic effect on reducing transmission. A June 2020 paper in Nature claimed that lockdowns would save three to four million lives worldwide. But it assumed without evidence that slowing the spread was due to lockdowns rather than voluntary behavior and that as lockdowns stretched on they would remain just as effective as in the early days of the pandemic. After it was published places with stringent lockdowns including California, the United Kingdom and Italy experienced second waves. A possible theory is that lockdowns become less effective over time because the public grows weary of the social isolation and starts gathering in private households on a more frequent basis. According to contact tracing data in New York 74% of cases were contracted inside people's homes. You close bars, you close restaurants, you close theaters, you close stadiums, you close mass gatherings. Where do people go? They go home, come to my house. Big city mayors who promoted aggressive lockdowns are beginning to change tack even amidst large caseloads. Chicago's Lori Lightfoot and Washington D.C.'s Muriel Bowser have pushed for reopening restaurants for indoor dining and San Francisco NLA's mayors have allowed outdoor dining to resume. A January 5th study by a research team at Stanford compared countries that shut down non-essential businesses with ones that took less restrictive public health measures like only banning large events and discouraging international travel. It found no evidence that the more stringent lockdowns contributed substantially to bringing down the case rate. Economist Lyman Stone told Reason in May of 2020 that his study of the lockdowns revealed no correlation between the timing of a state or nationwide stay-at-home order and the spread of the virus. So we have a couple different data sources that basically track your cell phone, which is a little bit creepy. And what we can see is that policy choices like shelter and place orders have almost no impact on when people began to socially distance. People were already socially distancing before the lockdown. Social distancing works. Stone's early findings are consistent with the Stanford study, which found that exposure to information about the virus and its risks was a stronger driver of anti-contagion behaviors than the specific nature of the government restrictions. Neither California's statewide restrictions nor Florida's more laissez-faire approach have proven effective at suppressing the virus. But various Asian governments and Australia have, for now, mostly accomplished that feat and not primarily through lockdowns. For instance, the densely populated city of Hong Kong has experienced fewer than 200 COVID deaths out of a population that exceeds 7 million. But authorities there imposed only one short-lived lockdown in a single neighborhood experiencing an outbreak in mid-January. Stone attributes the overall low case rate to the city state's aggressive travel restrictions and targeted public health measures, which were enacted early in the pandemic. We should not hesitate to pull the trigger on closing borders. Second, mask early, mask often. Everyone should wear a mask. And they should do so as soon as you know that you have a threat of a pandemic. Information is the most powerful tool, getting people to understand the risk and protect themselves. But after that, centralized quarantine. Anyone who is a positive test in any close contact of a positive test, we need to isolate. California Governor Gavin Newsom lifted his stay-at-home order on January 25th. On the grounds, ICU's will have the required capacity in several weeks, but the state has withheld some of the data they use to make that projection. Theme parks will remain closed. In the meantime, Disneyland has opened one of its parking lots as Orange County's largest vaccination site. So far, California has had one of the slowest vaccine rollouts in the nation. With the rollout of the vaccine, which has not been proven to be the best rollout compared to other states, maybe there is a way we can responsibly sooner open up so that we can get back to business and get back to surviving.