Long-term effects of COVID-19 economic downturn on zoos

Yes, a long subject title.
Today many zoos are in trouble as they are shuttered, furloughing staff, pleading for funds.
Some small zoos will not reopen.
But when the stay-at-home orders are lifted, even when there is a vaccine, the world economic situation will be the worst it has been in generations. With the many deaths, some zoo expertise will disappear. Staff will mourn colleagues.

What are your thoughts about where zoos will be in six months? A year? Three years?
What planned exhibits will be delayed?
What new protocols will be in place and how will they affect zoo staff and zoo visitors?
Will zoos and aquariums fully recover from this economic crash?

 

Most of what you ask is pure speculation.

But - do not assume for a moment that 'small' zoos are more vulnerable than others. Small zoos are more resilient, and can survive (for the short-term at least) on the sort of tiny handouts and donations which would be of little use to medium or larger organisations. Larger places dependent on huge visitation, with large borrowings and often inefficient infrastructure, could well be more vulnerable. We have a saying in England - 'the larger you are, the harder you fall'.

Remember too, that no zoo can close independently of others unless something happens to its animals. Finding Vets to euthanase perfectly healthy, potentially important individuals of possibly highly endangered species in front of social media, the public (who have already made personal donations of money and goods), and the World's press will be a political challenge for any Government.

We have to assume that the weight of these decisions (and of course, the others they face) is the reason for their continued silence - for the moment at any rate.

In the medium term the future for smaller rural Zoos at least, which are already efficient and can manage on the restricted numbers of people who will be 'allowed out' with social distancing, must be positive - especially if much of their competition is out of bounds because it is indoors or densely attended; and especially if we come out into a world with no mass market commercial passenger aviation, and closed borders.

Where-ever the origins of the disease, the reason it is affecting us all - is unsustainable, mass, cheap (air) travel; which people have become to expect as a right. If this is no longer available, until say a vaccine is with us, and then because none of the economy airlines have survived the 2 years (maybe?) it takes to get there, people will have to spend their leisure time closer to home. Modern housing is too dense and too restrictive for them to accept house arrest for years rather than weeks...

 

Just had another thought - perhaps the fragmentation of this subject will result in some of the threads being 'missed'...?

 

This was intended to be different from the conservation thread.
I have spoken to some zoo directors who are seriously worried.
I know of planned exhibits that are being postponed. I anticipate some may simply never happen. As someone working in "the industry" for decades I expect there will be ramifications.
But I wanted to open the idea up to this Community to ponder.

 

Thanks - I hope my reply was in the right place then, as I didn't want to post it twice. Long-term ramifications (as TLD said should be in this thread) really are just speculation. There is no long-term until we've solved the short-term.

 

In Latin America most of the principal zoos are owned and run by the municipalities so they do have a lifeline (although funding and interest is always lacking) but as money is allocated to fighting the coronavirus they are almost certainly going to suffer.

But one advantage to zoos in this part of the world is that as they have invariably always suffered from lack in funding and faced adversity at all levels so I suppose they have resilience that will bear them through. I dearly hope that they do not go under due to this crisis.

 

60% of what is posted on ZooChat is speculation

 

That little?
Sorry, I can't help with that - we really can't see past the immediate, and need to focus on that.

 

I'm seeing some zoos asking for money on social media lately so that has me worried.

What I'm wondering is what zoo attendance is going to be like when they open back up. On the one hand, a lot of people are gonna be struggling with money and may not be able to go much. On the other hand, people are gonna be itching to get out, and many zoos are pretty affordable as far as paid outings go. I wonder if some zoos will reduce their ticket prices for a while to attract more people. This may be overly optimistic, but I wouldn't be surprised if zoo attendance goes up for a while. (assuming that there aren't restrictions on how many people are allowed in the zoo when things can reopen) Of course, even if that happens zoos are still going to have to delay construction and look for other ways to cut costs and make money to make up for all of the time closed.

 

I'm convinced that zoos will bounce back stronger than ever. I have a couple of bookshelves at home that are packed with hundreds of zoo history books, often with vivid descriptions of how the establishments have overcome adversity at one time or another to flourish. There are occasions when a major zoo has come close to closure (London Zoo in the late 1990s), or struggled after funding dried up in the 1970s (many American zoos), but nothing compares to the destruction wrought by World War II. Berlin Zoo was essentially turned to a pile of rubble, Budapest Zoo had about a dozen animals left as thousands were destroyed, and there are at least 50 other examples across Europe. Zoos can overcome adversity and thrive once the world stabilizes. They are incredibly resilient institutions.

At this moment it is obviously difficult to look beyond the short-term, but I am hopeful and feel encouraged because major zoos always seem to succeed no matter what occurs. Multiple hurricanes can damage chunks of Zoo Miami and now that zoo is better than ever. Hurricane Katrina ravaged the city of New Orleans and the Audubon Zoo lost only a few animals. Budgets have been slashed at zoos and philanthropy has then soared. Yes, there will be some zoos lost in the wake of Covid-19's path (Special Memories Zoo in Wisconsin has already closed and good riddance to that roadside menagerie!), but I'm truly hopeful that the future will be bright for those zoos that can hang in there and stay the course.

An intriguing example is not Omaha's Henry Doorly Zoo, but the Lee G. Simmons Conservation Park & Wildlife Safari about 30 minutes down the road. With the zoo closed, the Wildlife Safari had a record-setting day of 7,663 visitors on March 27th. People had been cooped up in their homes and bored out of their minds, and when Wildlife Safari opened it was as if a light went off in the brains of almost 8,000 people at once. "Let's go to the zoo!" Even though no one was allowed out of their vehicles, and even though there was a line-up all day long that was a mile down the road, people sat in their idling cars for hours just to slowly drive down a road to see some deer, elk and bison. I've visited that safari park and I don't think that anything else can be seen in the drive-through section and I certainly wouldn't want to spend an entire day edging my way down an Omaha highway, through a paddock with deer, then see some bison and elk off in the distance...but people were thrilled just to get the heck out of their homes. The attendance numbers at that park in the past month have obliterated any other attendance records in the 22 years of the establishment's existence. Wow!

When the coronavirus pandemic subsides, whenever that might be, there will be an astonishing, jaw-dropping number of visitors at zoos that survive to see the light of day. I've visited exactly 520 different zoos and aquariums in my lifetime and I'm truly hoping that most of them will be seeing record-breaking attendance numbers in 2021. Government support is going to have to occur to get many zoos through to next year and then hopefully the floodgates open. I'm a high school teacher and at my school of approximately 50 staff members there were 15 people who had booked an international vacation over our March two-week spring break. All of those educators had to cancel their trips and now 'spring break' has turned into what will likely be months of getting paid while organizing online learning from our homes. When we have virtual staff meetings, with everyone logging onto their laptops at once, the big discussion is where people are going to fly to as soon as the coronavirus dies down. Folks are already tentatively outlining holidays for next year! Even British Columbians who have lost their jobs have received unemployment insurance that tops them up by on average 75% of their usual wages, meaning that people are sitting at home making almost the exact same amount of money as they did when they were heading off to work every day. There will obviously be many who struggle with finances, with some businesses going under, but the Canadian government has done an admirable job in a dire situation. The hope is that people will still have expendable income after coronavirus dissipates and part of that money will lead to zoo visits and holidays.

If everyone can practice social distancing appropriately, hunker down for much of 2020, grasp at any financial support available, then in 2021 there will be record-breaking attendance numbers at zoos. Fingers crossed.

* I do realize that I speak from a relatively privileged position as I'm still getting paid and I live in a country that is relatively healthy in terms of finances.

 

Brilliant comment and in fact just the kind of optimism that I needed to read right now. I really do hope that it holds true.

 

In the public zoo sector I think American zoos are in a particularly invidious position, especially if this goes as long as I expect and they aren’t open again before November.

American municipal and state budgets are falling off a cliff right now. Local governments in the US have relatively limited taxation options, and those they do impose, such as sales and property taxes, are taking a big hit. They also have extensive funding responsibilities - cities run their own schools, police and fire departments, for instance. Unlike the federal government they can’t simply print money, which countries like the UK and Australia are already doing.

They are going to emerge from this with crushing debt burdens, in many cases on top of debt they incurred in the 2008-2013 recession and haven’t paid off. There is going to be a painful set of decisions to make post-crisis and I fear zoos will do poorly out of those decisions. I suspect we’ll see the following consequences:

- new developments that aren’t yet funded will not go ahead. I don’t think we’ll see major new projects commissioned for several years, perhaps not until the second half of the decade.

- some new developments that *are* partially or even fully-funded won’t go ahead either. This is a particular risk the longer the shutdown goes, and zoos burn through their cash reserves. I don’t doubt there’s already directors working through the accounting and legal ramifications of raiding capital works funding. North Carolina’s Asian and Australian precincts are an example of a project I would be very surprised to see go ahead.

- some zoos will be privatised and others will be downsized. I think the former is a particular risk in Republican-controlled jurisdictions, because they have an inbuilt skepticism about public institutions to begin with. Luckily most cities are now Democratic strongholds but there are some exceptions, including Wichita (Sedgwick County). That’s not to say I think zoos in Democratic cities are fully immune from such threats.

- yes, I think some ‘public’ zoos will close, if this drags on long enough. This is most likely among the non-profit zoos. For every San Diego or Omaha that is flush with cash, there’s many more that are essentially local entities in small economies, without big donor bases. Is Jackson Zoo, to pick one example, really in a position to take on a couple of million in debt to survive a year long closure? Who is going to extend it that kind of credit, knowing that in a best case scenario it will reopen into a city where tens of thousands have lost their jobs and don’t have money to waste on going to the zoo?

In many ways this is a bigger threat to zoos than even World War II. Yes, Berlin Zoo was a pile of rubble, but it recovered over the following couple of decades along with the broader German and European economy. That recovery was engineered by the biggest peacetime expansion of the state in global history, and public institutions were a natural beneficiary of that sort of economic structure. I suspect that’s the best way ‘out’ of the economic hole we’re all now in, but that doesn’t mean it’s the one we’ll necessarily take.

 

I don’t necessarily agree with November being likely. I don’t believe the United States will sustain these forced closures on much of the economy past June. Many Americans are already getting fed up with forced isolation and I can see no way in which the government can keep most of the economy shut down for an extended period of time through the summer, governors and citizens will essentially rebel. Many states have relatively low caseloads at the moment, as it is concentrated in a few keys states. In those states zoos will be hit harder, yet for example in my state of NC, we only have 5000 cases and will peak in the next few weeks according to projections.

State and local governments are in trouble though with declining sales tax revenue due to such drastically reduced customer spending. This will weigh on zoos and aquariums, as they should not expect to receive government funding for capital projects in coming years. The NC Zoo will definitely be impacted but probably least of any institution in this country. They are one of the only state funded zoos, and while I do not expect an increase in their budget in coming years, they generally have funding agreements several years out with legislators. The Asian expansion will likely be delayed until late 2023 at minimum though, yet I 100% expect it to go forward. The complex is paid for by a mix of bond money (which voters agreed too, hence it cannot be siphoned off), zoo society fundraising, and lastly state appropriations that have already occurred.

If we were to keep the economy and institutions closed til November it would most certainly though cause unimaginable damage. Museums, theaters, zoos, small businesses, restaurants, gas stations, and more would likely close across the country. That in turn would lead to even more millions of job loses. Hence why I can’t see a single politician or governor supporting sending their jurisdiction off an economic cliff.

 

I agree with your rationale, but unfortunately it’s why I made the relatively early decision to leave the US (at least compared to other Australians I’m aware of, who mostly waited until our government essentially ordered them to come home). I can’t think of a worse way for a developed country to have to manage this crisis than by having a large, decentralised country with fragmented political responsibility and, dare I say it out loud, a tendency among a large number of public officials to live in denial of bad news. The critical mistake I expect to be made is that leaders will confuse lower National infection numbers to mean lower risk. It doesn’t in such a large and decentralised country.

It’s for those reasons that I fear your country will be living with the worst consequences of this - both deaths and economic destruction - for longer than other rich countries. New York is having an outbreak now, but overcoming it in New York doesn’t mean that it won’t subsequently reach a catastrophic level in Oklahoma City or Denver or wherever else. It’s going to be a rolling series of outbreaks that will make it effectively impossible for any responsibly-run state or city to reopen public spaces in a sustained way. And the corollary or that is that the economic damage is going to be deeper and last longer than in other, better run countries.

I wish I shared your optimism.

 

Interesting discussion...

In the US at least, I fully expect zoos to be back open by mid June, maybe July at the latest. I really don't see a scenario where we are still quarantined by the time Summer rolls around. Families will be eager to get out of there homes and go out somewhere - which is the case in Omaha as shown by @snowleopard whose optimism I share - and zoos will be the perfect day out. This year many zoos will take a major hit, pretty much every major zoo will hit record low attendance in recent times, but I do have faith the following years will see a serge of popularity in many parks.

In the case of new or upcoming exhibits things may actually be better than they seem, depending on where the construction is taken place. For example, Milwaukee's new hippo exhibit is still on track to open in June (assuming this can blow over in time) like it originally was and work is still allowed to happen, as the Wisconsin governor has allowed for construction projects to continue. Of course, this was a project that was already in the process of being built by the time the virus became an issue, so perhaps similar projects will be able to continue to be built such as San Diego's children's zoo, Omaha's sea lion exhibit, Lincoln Park's lion exhibit, etc. Of course, it's a state by state (or country by country) thing. It's likely some of the future projects that have yet to start construction such as North Carolina's Asia complex will be delayed a few years until funding can be obtained, but I think its a bit absurd to suggest that the project would be abandoned completely, especially after over a decade of planning.

Now, will zoos and aquariums fully recover from this economic crash? In short, yes. There have been numerous catostrophic events in history that have left places like zoos in disrepair, yet they have always bounced back. This will be no different. Some small zoos will unfortunately be lost in the chaos, but major AZA zoos will all be just fine after this is all over.

@CGSwans how are things over in Australia? I haven't heard much about the effect of Covid there so I'm assuming it's being managed at least marginally well.

 

I'll quote this bit first because it's the happier part of the conversation. We are doing surprisingly well here. New infection rates are down to around 2% per day, compared to about 20-25% a few weeks ago. That was the time when I and many other Australians were flying in from overseas, and the majority of Australians who have been diagnosed with Covid-19 have in fact contracted it overseas, mostly in Europe and the US. Our community transmission rate remains low, but we are going to need at least several more months of tight social distancing restrictions, probably followed by a prolonged period with closed borders, to ensure that remains the case. Which brings me to...

Let me paint you just such a scenario.

I'll start by acknowledging the truth above: families *will* be eager to get out of their homes and go somewhere. For what it's worth, that's not only Americans, it's all of us (me included!) and it's not only Americans who don't like being told what to do either. But for a variety of reasons, I do agree that America is more likely to be 'opened up' by June than other comparable countries. So let me explain why:
a) that's a really frigging awful idea; and,
b) it can't last.

First, let's be clear that because of USA's federal structure with highly independent (and politically very different) states, there won't be a single point in time where the entire country 'opens' at once. The most important and probably loudest voice calling for a swift return to normal is the President, but he doesn't actually have most of the power in this situation, it's state governors. So while some Republican governors might heed Donald Trump's demands to get the economy moving again, Democratic ones are far less likely to listen to him. As such, I'm going to paint our scenario in a state where the governor has already shown a tendency to view coronavirus in the same way that Trump has.

Let's say... Florida. Apart from being a state that's more likely than most to open up too soon, it's also a state where the time frame - opening things up at the beginning of June - makes a bit of sense. Florida's (first) 'peak' is coming quite soon. They have already had a horrible few weeks, with at least 460 deaths, but they also have over 19,000 known active cases: it's not an exaggeration to say that thousands of people are likely to die in Florida over the next few weeks, but by the end of May - seven weeks from now - the daily infection rate and death toll is likely to be falling, not still increasing. So Governor Ron DeSantis might think it's safe for people to leave the house.

It's going to take a little bit of math to explain why he would be very wrong to do that.

See, even if the daily number of new infections are going *down*, in the short term that doesn't necessarily mean the virus is starting to go away. You might have heard of something called the 'R' number, which in simple terms is the number of other people that each person who has coronavirus infects with the virus. If the virus has an R number of 1.0, then every person who gets the virus will infect on average one other person. If the R number is anywhere above 1.0 - whether that's 5, or 3, or even only 1.1, then the outbreak is still growing. It's only when the R number is below 1.0 that the virus will start to die out, and it's only if the R number gets down to zero that the virus will be extinct (which, I'm afraid, will never happen without a very effective, widely used vaccine).

The higher the R number is above 1, the more contagious it is. Obviously Covid-19 is a new disease and so there's still a degree of uncertainty about precisely what the 'natural' R number would be without any social distancing, but the most common estimate is that it's around 2. In other words, if we just go back to living our lives they way we were five weeks ago, every person who gets coronavirus would infect an average of two other people.

That might not sound like a lot, but it really is. To see why, take a calculator and hit 2 x 2: you'll get the number 4, which is about how many people have gotten the coronavirus after a week or so. Then hit 'x 2' again, and then again: after two weeks, you have 16 people. Now do it another four times: after four weeks, that one infection has become hundreds and hundreds of people. After a second month, we're talking about hundreds of thousands. This is why we've all been stuck in our homes: not because of the hundreds of thousands of people who already have it, but because of the hundreds of millions of people who will get it if we don't.

The whole point of closing everything and staying indoors is to get that R number down below 1. As a general rule, the more we stay distant from each other the further the R number will fall. If every single one of us managed to stay 'perfectly' socially distant, by not touching anything or going within a few metres of anybody else for a couple of weeks, we could get the R number down to zero and all this would be over. Unfortunately that's just not possible, so we're stuck trying to achieve just enough social distancing so that we can get the number below one. Once we do that, we can start doing more and more testing to try to at least find everybody who has the virus and just isolate them, rather than all of us.

The simple, unfortunate truth is that though we are getting there - I saw a report earlier today that estimated Ohio, one of the states that is handling this better than most, could have their R number down to 1.2 - we aren't there yet. Effectively, Ohio has slowed the spread, but they haven't stopped it.

What that means is that if we start to remove the social distancing restrictions now, the numbers will start to go back up very quickly.

Of course, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis probably isn't *quite* as dumb as I think he could be, so he probably won't *entirely* remove restrictions. He might let Zoo Miami open, for instance, but say they can only have 1000 people visit per day, or something similar. Maybe they let people go to the beach, but they keep the change rooms closed. Things like that. The R number isn't likely to get back to the natural rate of 2.0, but it won't stay below 1.0, either. For simplicity, let's assume that Florida's restrictions allow the virus to have an R number of 1.5: for every two people who have the virus, another three will catch it.

So the R number is one part of this puzzle. The other is the number of cases in the community. Unfortunately, we don't actually know how many cases there are, but we know there's many, many more than the official statistics show, because America isn't doing much testing for the size of its population. I saw one report today that said that 20% of all people in New York who *are* tested have the virus, but nobody really knows how many people there are who have the virus and are contagious, but have either minor symptoms or no symptoms and thus never get tested.

I'm going to be very, very kind to Florida and guess that at the time DeSantis opens things up at the beginning of June there is 'only' 100 people in Florida who have the virus and aren't in quarantine. It's likely to be many more than that, but bear with me.

So it's June 1 and Zoo Miami is back open! So are all the other zoos, movie theatres, golf courses, beaches and even Disney World. Donald Trump is thrilled at the good news and promptly flies Air Force One down to Palm Beach for a campaign rally and a quick visit to Mar-e-Lago. Florida is back in business.

The question is, where are those 100 people who aren't in quarantine? Maybe one of them attends that Trump rally, where they infect everybody around them with something even more toxic than right-wing grievance politics. Maybe one of them works at Disney World and spends their days handing visitors hot dogs. Maybe some of them are still worried about the virus and do their best to stay out of crowded places: lots and lots of people are still going to be too scared to go out.

Either way, we already know there's an R number of 1.5. Maybe the Disney World employee infects 15 people and nine others stay at home and don't infect anybody, but however it works, those 100 people infect another 150 in the first few days after Florida opens up.

Then another few days pass, and those 150 people infect 225 more. It'll take about two weeks for any of those 150 people to start to have symptoms, and likely a couple of weeks more before the numbers make it clear that Florida's outbreak is out of control again. By the end of the month, those original 100 people have made perhaps 2000 people sick. After another month, those 2000 people have made another 24,000 or so people sick. It's only at about that time - early August - that any of those 100 people who *did* become badly sick will die. It's not until September that Florida hospitals start to send people home to die because they still don't have enough ventilators.

Of course, Florida's decision doesn't only hurt Florida. As you say, many families are just *desperate* to get out of the house, and Florida's a popular and seemingly safe destination. Some of the people that the Disney World hot dog salesperson infected might have come from Chicago, and they didn't know they were infected until long after they got off the plane. Or maybe they thought they'd be careful and drove to Orlando and back, so they wouldn't sit in a germ-filled plane. Meanwhile, at the Trump rally, an infected person coughed just a little too close to a Secret Service agent as they jostled for a good view of the President. Suddenly Florida's decision has caused cases in Chicago, Washington DC and a gas station or hotel room on the road from Orlando. By the time DeSantis realises that he's made a terrible mistake and closes Disney World and Zoo Miami again, it's too late.

Until and unless we have the case number so low that we literally know of every single case, this is what will happen if we remove the social distancing restrictions.

So yes, you're right: maybe Americans will get impatient and maybe politicians will give into their demands to open the zoos: it is, after all, an election year. But open too soon and they're just going to close again, with more dead people, with more lost jobs, with more pain and suffering before this is all over.

There are no shortcuts. The virus doesn't care if we are bored and want to go to the zoo, but if it *was* capable of caring it'd probably be very happy, because it needs us to get out and about to survive. This is essentially a very long, very frustrating staring contest: if we blink first, the virus wins.

 

I hope you all managed to wade your way through..! What was missed, was that after all that, is all it takes is one person on one aeroplane to bring it back and he whole process starts over again negating all the personal and financial sacrifice.....

More isolated countries (like Australia?) can feel a bit smug for the short-term, but if your economy depends on mass international tourism, how can you tell which person that next carrier is?

June is laughable, it is much more likely to be mid-2021.

Before that all that can be tried are very small, very controlled, very local relaxations followed by observation of the effects, and probably immediate reintroduction of lock-downs.

Organisations dependent on mass numbers of visitors will not be able to open as before, and will need two years of funding in place. Smaller ones perhaps less... or the Governments will need to call in the Vets.

In our case we were either the last, or one of the last, zoos to close in the UK. We did not receive the mass visitation solicited by the National Trust and others, and during the run up to the closure our daily numbers reduced from say the expected daily 400 to around 150, as people were obviously frightened. Those that did come come were very sensible and rigorously social distanced, and had a great time; we had the glass till screens and other measures (introduced a month later by the supermarkets) already in place. If we move to (say) a controlled on-line pre-paid ticket purchase system which along with smart-phone aps and car number plate recognition, only allows local movement of small numbers, we can survive on a couple of hundred people per day, so long as they behave as our visitors did a month ago. Perhaps we also double our entry ticket prices to compensate for the income drop and become more elitist, discouraging the crowds?

(sorry, I did say I wouldn't SPECULATE, but a drizzly morning means I am in the office...)

 

Yes, this is what I was explaining, but I chose to go into the detail to explain why. Thank you for the reiteration though.

I assure you we are not smug, and if we make the mistake of becoming smug then we will suffer mightily for it.