www.ticketnews.com: With the future of live events at scale dependent on consumer confidence in safety and local regulations, Wynn Resorts is taking a unique approach to reopening its doors. The Las Vegas entertainment giant has plans for launching its own COVID-19 testing lab, churning out rapid results to allow concerts and conventions to take place.
7 comments:
I think Wynn Resort’s approach to dealing with COVID-19 is quite unique. Creating your own testing site and having everyone take a test every day to ensure that they are not infected will be very costly, though. They will need to hire tons of medical staff and hire backup staff each night incase someone tests positive. I do think that this approach could work but I don’t think this is cost-effective for every event. For example, a concert of 200 or so people would not be able to make money if they had to hire 10 medical professionals to help administer and conduct these tests. Plus, if they are trying to make an in house testing facility, they would have to provide insurance to these medical professionals and maybe even hazard pay if they want it. Overall I think it is a good idea, but not cost-effective.
Wynn Resort definitely has an interesting approach to holding events safely. In an ideal world, this would be a wonderful idea, but we don't live in an ideal world. People could get infected in the time period waiting to get their test, there could be false results, so many more things to think about. Branching off of Jake's comment it doesn't seem very cost-effective or time productive either. Hiring testing professionals and then paying for the physical tests would be very extensive. I think on a deeper level this is a small window into how capitalistic our society is. There are many people who don't have access to testing or cannot afford testing in the United States but if you have enough money you can go see a concert and get tested. I am very curious to see how this plan plays out and also how many people are willing to go through the process to get tested.
This is definitely one way to start working on getting your operations back to "normal" again. While I am unsure how much it is going to cost and if it will be cost affective, it seems as though Wynn Resorts has found a way to restart the entertainment sector of their company. I'm sure the bulk of their profit comes from its entertainment side, especially night clubs, so it makes they are working so hard to get all of it back up and running. I am curious as to how they will handle positive cases. With the idea that you most likely aren't contagious for the first 48 hours after being infected, it seems pretty straight forward. Test everyone every day, especially employees, and if someone tests positive, they are quarantined. The real questions is what happens to the people they were recently in contact with. If they tested negative the day prior, I would assume that won't matter as it hasn't been 48 hours, however, are they willing to risk it?
As much as I want to put my faith in this system, current events kind of are preventing me from getting all the way there. I think it certainly has potential, but this system relies on a bit of an honor system. What happens if someone tests negative at 3pm, and goes out to dinner and catches it at 5? Or if someone on the event staff forgets to get tested, is positive, and somehow bypasses the entry process? I know we are all eager to get back into the normal functions of entertainment, but this just seems so risky. I mean, take Disneyworld for example. Disney jumped right back in as soon as Florida opened the state, and Florida remains one of the COVID hotspots in the US because of the general irresponsibility they have surrounding public events and spaces. I think it is a great idea to have a testing lab on site, as this could mitigate COVID numbers in a significant way, but I think there are way too many loopholes to this that we are not seeing.
I think that this is a great idea and will work very well if they can get it approved and working like a well oiled machine. I do have my worries, namely how patient are people going to be. What happens if they have already purchased tickets and get a positive result? Will Wynn be ready to refund the entire ticket, or will it be added to ticket terms that it's forfeit? Vegas is often a quick vacation trip and if someone is there for only one night and can't see the concert, you know someone is going to throw a fit. I also think about how long someone will be green lit for? A lot can happen in a few hours and a lot of those might not be spent sober. I would like to see more on their contingency plans and will be keeping an eye on this. I attend a very large (up to 100k people) convention every year and would be interested to see how this endeavor goes and if it will be applied to conventions as well.
This seems very unstable to me. First, rapid testing results are not completely reliable. False negatives or even false positives could spell disaster for this venue. There is a reason that isolation housing exists on CMU’s campus, and you cannot leave until you test negative on a full blown COVID test, not just a rapid test. Secondly, the resources for COVID testing seem to me to be very stretched thin. Out of all my friends, my university is the only one to upkeep random testing protocols. Over the summer, countless universities proposed regular testing (weekly or bi-weekly), and none were able to follow through on that promise. Even CMU had to resort to only testing random batches of the population, and that is already way more than what other universities are doing. I do not trust this venue’s ability to upkeep their stock of COVID tests when they are already likely struggling financially as is. I think the company should keep these kinds of proposals to themselves until they completely know how they will accomplish this feat.
This still feels risky to me? I’m really trying to not just shoot down every reopening and covid-mitigation plan I see, but it just feels like fast testing is not reliable enough and that it relies so much on the honor system. One of the big frustrations with covid testing is that it analyzes you at the moment you took it, not after (which is how time works, I know, but). I was tested through CMU on Tuesday this week because I had a minor sore throat and congestion, and was given a 15-minute quick test and a 2-day, more thorough test. When the first one came back negative, I still needed to assume a false negative and continue isolating while I waited for the second, due to a relatively high false negative rate in the quick test. The second also came back negative, so I went back to work as soon as I could, and instantly those test results mean nothing because I have been back out into the world since then and interacted with people and objects. For this one, all it takes is a few false negatives and then large groups of people who have been interacting under the premise of safety are going to get sick. It just feels irresponsible to me to be holding large, in-person entertainment events until we get a vaccine in place.
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