ORLANDO, Fla. — Every week, it seems, Kaila Barker, her husband and their five children change their minds about whether to travel from their home in Connecticut to Florida’s Walt Disney World as planned in September.

On the one hand, the lack of crowds means more opportunities to go on rides without long waits. On the other hand, Connecticut and Florida have implemented pandemic-related quarantines for each other’s residents and visitors, and the Barkers worry whether the Disney “magic” will get lost with mandatory mask-wearing for visitors and workers, temperature checks and no parades, fireworks shows or up-close “meet-and-greets” with costumed characters.

“We keep going back and forth. It’s such a hard decision to make,” Barker said last Tuesday.

Two weeks after Disney World started opening its theme parks for the first time since closing in March because of COVID-19, the Barkers’ quandary affects not only Disney World’s future but that of central Florida’s tourism-reliant economy.

More than 75 million visitors came to Orlando in 2018, mostly due to its reputation as a theme park mecca, which also includes Universal Orlando and SeaWorld Orlando. But the coronavirus has upended Orlando’s status as the most visited place in the U.S.

In the week that Disney World’s Magic Kingdom and Animal Kingdom started welcoming back visitors, occupancy of hotel rooms in the Orlando area was down more than 60 percent from the previous year, a much deeper drop than the state as a whole, which declined more than 41 percent, according to STR, which tracks hotel data.

Less than half of Disney World’s 43,000 unionized workers have been recalled to their old jobs, contributing to two Orlando-area counties having the state’s highest unemployment rates last month — Osceola at 22.9 percent and Orange at 17.2 percent. Disney World has an overall workforce of 77,000 employees, the nation’s largest single-site labor force.

Many of those still-furloughed workers are about to lose federal benefits at the end of the month.

“This is an extremely difficult moment,” said Paul Cox, president of the local union that represents stagehands and show technicians at Disney World. “There are still a majority of workers who are staying at home and they’re about to lose support. Things are going to get bad.”

Union officials estimate the Disney parks are no more than a third full, but that may be more by design to maintain social distancing. Disney World doesn’t release attendance figures, but in pre-pandemic times its four parks and two water parks could host around 150,000 visitors a day.

Cowen Inc. estimated recently that Disney’s parks and resorts won’t return to pre-pandemic profitability until fiscal year 2025, and there is a “meaningful” probability that Disney World could close again because of the pandemic.