Casinos re-opened in Arizona on June 1st, with lines of patrons stretching hundreds of feet, waiting for the doors to open. Here we are on June 25th, and right on schedule Arizona case counts and COVID-19 hospitalizations have blown up. Many Nevada casinos opened June 4th. Here we are, exactly three weeks later, and Nevada's cases have spiked to roughly 500 in the last 24 hours.
The situation in Nevada is worse than it appears. Nevada does not count out-of-state visitors who likely caught the virus while visiting. This statistical trickeration has consequences. It plays down the number and severity of outbreaks originating in Nevada. It makes these outbreak events more difficult to identify. And it renders contact tracing virtually impossible and not the concerns of the state of Nevada. The casinos know this; casino management isn't brain dead. They're just playing along with this state versus state game of handing off responsibilities and costs. The casinos shield their own state from bad public relations as long as possible. Lives will be lost and avoidable misery will ensue, but more money gets made for the state.
Patrons in Nevada casinos are required to wear masks for table games lacking plastic partitions. They can lose the masks anywhere else in casinos without recrimination. Slots, video poker, restaurants, the sports books -- masks are optional. A CET promotional team visited Bally's, Harrah's, the Linq, the Flamingo, and Caesars Palace last weekend, handing out $20 in free play to random wearers of masks. That seems a reasonable if modest attempt to reward good behavior. It also makes sense since the CET properties in general have less cubic air volume per person than CET's biggest strip competitor, MGM/Mirage/Mandalay. I think that CET is more at risk for outbreak events than MGM/Mirage/Mandalay or the Wynn properties.
A friend of mine told me back in February that she didn't see any real difference between cruise ships and casinos. Since then, a handful of newspaper columns have made the same observation. Petri dishes are petri dishes.
The bottom line is that Arizona and Nevada are being overwhelmed by the virus right on schedule. Opening casinos the first week in June was a really bad idea.
Let's Get Meta
Here we go. We have an industry, the casino business, that relies on people either being unable to believe math applies to themselves or being so addicted to certain behaviors that they don't care. This industry runs into a pandemic that shuts it down. The industry then decides it will re-open while ignoring criteria set by epidemiologists, who are using probabilistic models. So casinos decide that ignoring probability to re-open businesses that rely squarely on probability is the way to go.
Meanwhile, customers flood casinos upon the re-openings. The customers are slaves to probability while gambling with their money, thus they are consistent when they are slaves to probability while gambling with their lives and their families' lives.
The curious in-joke twist to this is that President Donald Trump at one time oversaw four Atlantic City casinos, including the Trump Taj Mahal. Despite having probability on their side, they all eventually failed, rotating through four bankruptcies. Thus, the man with probability on his side managed to go bankrupt. Now he has set the stage by ignoring the probability projections of disease experts and thereby cheerleading the re-opening of probability-dependent casinos owned by others. The man who failed at owning casinos, and failed Atlantic City, has heavily influenced policy decisions for all of the nation's previous-to-pandemic successful casinos. Irony, anyone?
Eventually, reality will rear its statistically very likely if not inevitable head. Casinos will be identified as origin sites of outbreaks. At that point, an industry that has relied on probability to make money but has ignored probability to re-open, will shut down again. The sturdy Americans who flocked to early re-opening casinos despite epidemiological warnings, thereby ignoring probability so they could, while gambling, ignore probability, will be sidelined from gambling until they are once more instructed to... ignore probability.
And people wonder why we have a grasping-of-probability problem in this country.
Bob Dietz
June 25, 2020
