Voice of OC: OC Business Reopenings, including Disneyland, Could Slow with New State Coronavirus Metric

Anaheim Mayor Harry Sidhu, Disney officials and Assemblywoman Sharon Quirk-Silva (D-Fullerton) have been pressuring Gov. Gavin Newsom to release theme park reopening guidelines over the past month. 

Orange County Health Care Agency Director and Public Health Officer But at a Wednesday news conference, Newsom said those guidelines won’t be coming out any time soon. 

“It’s very complex. These are like small cities, small communities,” Newsom said. “But we don’t anticipate in the immediate term any of these larger theme parks reopening until we see more stability in terms of the data.”  The positivity rate in one zip code next to Disneyland is over 8 percent, according to county Health Care Agency data.  When cases spiked in July, positivity rates in neighborhoods like that were as high as 20 percent.  New cases and positivity rates have since eased, but have shown some increases in recent weeks.  In order for OC to move to the next tier, it’s going to have to bring down the positivity rate in the Disneyland-adjacent neighborhood to less than 5.2 percent. 

Numerous zip codes in Santa Ana and a pocket in Tustin far exceed the 5.2 percent positivity threshold also.  State public health officials have averaged those positivity rates at 6.6 percent, more than double the countywide 3.2 percent rate. “We’re going to be led by a health first framework and we’re going to be stubborn about it,” Newsom said. “While we feel there’s no hurry in putting out guidelines, we’re continuing to work with the industry, with amusement parks.”  He also confirmed Disney’s Executive Chairman Bob Iger quit Newsom’s economic recovery task force.  Newsom said the move “Didn’t come to me as a surprise at all. There were disagreements on opening a major theme park. We’re going to let science and data dictate the decision.”