To cancel or not cancel

[a1tinkfans]

Whatever was decided… just stick with it without second or the it’s thoughts!

 

[ShannyMcB]

Couple questions DH and I posed to ourselves before making our decision a month ago, they helped us. Disclaimer, our trip was before the school year began...we returned home a full week and a half before start of school.

What is the transmission rate in your home state/county? How much worse is FL or any other states you are traveling through? Way worse, a little worse, about the same?
Do you have anyone you would be returning home to that you cannot distance from that is high risk? Are these people at risk of exposure from you when you are going about your typical lives?
What is your risk tolerance at home? Do you eat at restaurants? Bring the kids on errands? Or are you at home at all times except work/school?

All of our risk tolerances are different.

Another question to pose...what happens if you postpone and something happens at that point? We had factors beyond covid that influenced our decision.

Just some food for thought. Decisions right now are hard...even the simple ones.
Because let's be real here no matter your decision someone is going to think you are nuts for making it! That person may even be you! And that's ok, we are all (well mostly all) just doing the best we can here, right?

 

[browneyedgirl1683]

We canceled. Our trip was supposed to be last week. Seeing that the crowds were so low did make me doubt for a brief moment. But the reality is that rates were so high at the time that we canceled (at the start of August) and we couldn't take the risk. What was really disturbing was the idea that we couldn't easily get medical care if anything went wrong, not just COVID. I also hated the idea of having to isolate in Florida. I couldn't pin down how Disney would handle it, I was worried about flying back and being turned away at the airport, and honestly---- did I really want to be stuck in a hotel room for days at Disney with two kids who would constantly be asking why we couldn't go to the parks?

It does look like rates are going down so you have that in your favor. I would set a limit for what you would be willing to accept and let that be a deciding factor. When we were going to go, rates were closer to 20% when I'm in a city of 3%. Numbers aren't sentimental. I would also consider what you would do in an emergency. Could you easily quarrantine if you had to? Are you driving or flying? Take it one day at a time.

 

[bsmcneil]

My husband and I are debating whether to cancel our WDW trip for the first week of October. He thinks it’s too dangerous to take our two unvaccinated children to a place with crowds and questionable social distancing. I think it won’t be worse than having my kids at school all day in a small classroom with 25 other kids who are not masked (no mask mandate in schools here).

Definitely get that it's a hard decision. I'm still weighing whether I go (alone) and I'm fully vaccinated. I wouldn't take my < 12 year old/unvaccinated kids now. I have a Jan '22 trip planned for them and will reschedule if they're not able to be vaccinated by then. I recently traveled and it was eye-opening to see how not-seriously some/many are taking covid (and I would personally feel super frustrated to work this hard this long and see someone in my family get covid now). And, I totally get that it's different for different folks (for instance, I'm still not letting them eat indoors at restaurants, etc).

Edited to add - I totally get fatigue; I do. But I'm hoping you're being hyperbolic when you say that traveling to WDW is no different than kids being in class with 25 others. I don't know if you're driving, flying, where you're staying, etc but the sheer amount of people you'll be encountering and with whom you'll share space is on such a different scale.

 

[DLgal]

If your husband isn't comfortable, cancel. It's not fair to make him go ahead with a trip when he has these worries. You should be on the same page on this.

FWIW, I agree with your husband. My friend and I (both vaccinated adults) cancelled our late August Orlando trip. The risk was not worth it. Covid is INCREDIBLY easy to catch. My healthy, vaccinate husband got it exactly 10 days before we were supposed to leave. Made my decision much more justified. He caught it at a casual outdoor event. Was sick within 2 days.

If you do go, have a backup plan to get home in the event one of you comes down with symptoms (if you are flying). This was central to my decision to cancel, as I travel from CA and would have no way to realistically get home and could not have spent an additional 10 days in Orlando if I developed symptoms prior to leaving.

 

[MikeOhio]

if you cancel now there’s no guarantee it will be any safer in the future. Case counts are also crashing in Florida.

 

[bsmcneil]

if you cancel now there’s no guarantee it will be any safer in the future. Case counts are also crashing in Florida.

They're really not crashing. Please feel free to share your opinions but be careful when stating things that sound like facts. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/us/covid-cases.html

Also - https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#county-view - you can check out Orange County, Fl and see a time lapse.

 

[MikeOhio]

They're really not crashing. Please feel free to share your opinions but be careful when stating things that sound like facts. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/us/covid-cases.html

Also - https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#county-view - you can check out Orange County, Fl and see a time lapse.

The peak 7 day average for Florida was august 16th at 29k. As of today the 7 day average is 15k. So cases have dropped by half in three weeks. That’s crashing and likely to continue to improve by October.

 

[bsmcneil]

The peak 7 day average for Florida was august 16th at 29k. As of today the 7 day average is 15k. So cases have dropped by half in three weeks. That’s crashing and likely to continue to improve by October.

And yet, we're here with planning a trip to Orange County, FL (etc) not just the whole state. Super misleading. I believe that if you go to the sites I offered which collects actual stats and numbers, you may see that while it's not as frantic as it was a couple of/few weeks ago - it is still not "crashing". Also - one could have said that when people got vaccines the number of cases crashed ... and yet, let's take a look at what the variants have done to that hypothesis?!

 

[beachdreamr1229]

So, here's my take as a very cautious California resident preparing to go to WDW in December with 3 kids. My children go to school with a mask mandate and I am a teacher. Not a day goes by that I don't get an email that there's a covid case at one of our schools. I am at the point where we will be cautious with masks and hand sanitizer everywhere we go, but I'm not cancelling. We've planned too long and the reality is, as much as I don't want them to get sick, with school and sports and everything else, there's always a chance of exposure. We have to live our lives to some extent even while being cautious.

That being said, it's an individual choice. Only your family can know the risk you're willing to take. Talk about it with your whole family. See how they feel. Talk to a doctor about your concerns. And best wishes for joy and health, no matter what you decide.

 

[persnickity]

Using the fact that kids are in one high risk environment as a reason that it's okay for them to enter a second, higher risk environment doesn't work for me. Now they're at more risk, and putting other kids that weren't in such high risk environments at home at more risk, and it all just snowballs.

So, personally, if my kids were not yet vaccinated, I would not choose to take them to a crowded environment OR send them to a school that didn't require masks. I really sympathize with families who can't make that second choice, it must be really, really hard. But the first is something that we all have control over.

 

[phoenixconfidential]

i loved the suggestion of comparing Orlando rates to your city's current rates. I did that real quick and not surprisingly we have very similar new case count each week as Orlando..... but then again I'm in TX :| I feel like that last sentence speaks for itself as the vaccine views overlap FL & TX.

 

[Dakota731]

Using the fact that kids are in one high risk environment as a reason that it's okay for them to enter a second, higher risk environment doesn't work for me. Now they're at more risk, and putting other kids that weren't in such high risk environments at home at more risk, and it all just snowballs.

So, personally, if my kids were not yet vaccinated, I would not choose to take them to a crowded environment OR send them to a school that didn't require masks. I really sympathize with families who can't make that second choice, it must be really, really hard. But the first is something that we all have control over.

They can make that choice by wearing masks on their own kids. Just because a school doesn’t have a mask mandate doesn't mean your child isn’t allowed to wear a mask or two if they want to.

 

[Chica1581]

They can make that choice by wearing masks on their own kids. Just because a school doesn’t have a mask mandate doesn't mean your child isn’t allowed to wear a mask or two if they want to.

Our kids wear masks at school but other kids in class do not. There are about 25 kids in each classroom. So far, in the three weeks since school started, there have been over 20 kids positive for COVID in her school (K-5). The school is begging parents to mask up but many still refuse.

 

[Chica1581]

i loved the suggestion of comparing Orlando rates to your city's current rates. I did that real quick and not surprisingly we have very similar new case count each week as Orlando..... but then again I'm in TX :| I feel like that last sentence speaks for itself as the vaccine views overlap FL & TX.

We are also in Texas, the rates in my county are worse than the ones in Orlando based on that website.

 

[DLgal]

I think a good thing to point out in these discussions is that taking a risk when there is enough of a benefit to offset it is usually okay. In the case of unvaccinated kids, the risk of attending school is countered by the benefits of attending school, both for academic and social/emotional purposes. If your kid ended up very sick with covid (like to the point of hospitalization) from a school exposure, while it would still be awful, as a parent, you will likely feel like school was somewhere your kid had to be and it's just an unfortunate occurrence, and you really felt you were doing what was best for your child by sending them to school.

However, if the same happened because of a theme park vacation, how many parents would be able to live with that guilt that their child was exposed at a theme park, a place they didn't HAVE to be at and arguably could have waited until after vaccination?

 

[Dakota731]

Florida’s rolling average of cases declining 29% from a week earlier, per CDC data.
AdventHealth Central Florida moved from red to yellow status today, having moved from black to red status last week. As a result, surgeries and more routine procedures can resume, as the hospital is now at only 75-80% of normal operational activity, according to a hospital rep interviewed by the Orlando Sentinel.

 

[WebmasterKathy]

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