Disney YouTubers Face Online Backlash After Visiting The Theme Park While Appearing To Be Sick
Should theme parks be allowed to reopen? Or should people just not go?
In attempts to stop the spread of coronavirus throughout the world, most things have shut down. With people working from home, many restaurants switching to take-away only and some businesses stopping operating entirely—the message many of us received was to stay at home, and only go out for essentials.
But, despite case numbers continuing to rise, many things in the United States are beginning to reopen. Disney World is one of the organisations who is back to welcoming visitors.
But its opening has raised some very serious questions. Is it the responsibility of businesses to remain closed (especially multi-million-dollar enterprises) or should the blame be on individuals for supporting them for reopening?
This Disney YouTuber, known as That Crazy Disney Lady, recently livestreamed her visit to the reopened park.
The YouTuber, Tonya Blakely, visited the park with her friend, Robin DePaolo. During the Magic Kingdom stream, DePaolo was shown to be experiencing symptoms, such as shortness of breath and high blood pressure--following an allergic reaction to a brownie.
She didn't believe that her reaction was severe enough to warrant the use of her EpiPen, but she did go to the medic station, took a Benadryl, and continued on with their day. Later, DePaolo was still feeling unwell, so they headed back to the medic station.
There, DePaolo was found to have high blood pressure and was vomiting. Despite medical advice, she refused to go to a hospital.
A Twitter user saw the stream and raised some (valid) questions.
While the original tweet was removed for "violating copyright," the discussion gained some attention.
Nicholson's Tweets, rather than blaming the women (she even withheld the channel name to avoid scapegoating them), instead have opened up a conversation about corporate responsibility.
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UNILAD spoke to Blakey, who denied they were sick and nor had they had any COVID-19 symptoms, about the incident, and she said:
"We were having a normal day like every other day. Having fun and enjoying our favourite Disney park, Magic Kingdom.
We were having lunch at Skipper canteen when robin took a bite of my dessert. It had cashew. We were wrong to not get a clarification of ingredients that was our only mistake.
I immediately took her to the medical office on Disney property where she was well taken care of by the nursing staff.
As she felt her throat starting to close from the allergic reaction to the tree nuts she got an anxiety attack which increased her blood pressure sky high and and she became nauseous and threw up.
Once we got home she got cleaned up and we went back out end of story we never have been sick it was an allergic reaction Benadryl helped and we went on about our merry way.
Nothing more nothing less. People will continue to question how we handle things and that’s fine because no one will ever see eye to eye on the situation.
But the bottom line is someone stole parts of the footage from the live stream splice it together to make their own video to make it appear as if we were sick with COVID-19 symptoms and frolicking in the parks spreading the disease to other people which is a 100% lie.
Furthermore whoever created the video on the Twitch platform it had gotten picked up by a large YouTube or who posted it all over Twitter and then it became viral and personal attacks began on Robin and I to include death threats. This has got to stop."
The question remains, as case numbers of COVID-19 continue to spike, is it ethical to reopen theme parks?
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Others have shared images of Disney World online...
No mask = no photo
What do you think? Should theme parks be opening up again?
Rachel
