Another reason to avoid indoor restaurant dining

A few days ago, the Washington Post published this article about a Korean study “that suggests the virus, under certain airflow conditions, travels farther than six feet and can infect others in as little as five minutes.”

I’ll let you read the details, but the study does show that maintaining six feet between tables in itself isn’t adequate. A person was infected by another person who was 21 feet away from them. And the first person was infected within five minutes of the second person sitting down, since the first person left the restaurant at that point. Of course, this isn’t a definitive study with thousands of restaurants and identical conditions – that simply isn’t possible. But anyone who would reject this study for that reason is a fool, IMHO. You might still go to restaurants, but that’s your own decision based on your personal risk factors for the disease and the likelihood that you might yourself already be infected. But you shouldn’t just ignore this study.

And neither should cities. Of course, in cities like New York, which just shut down all indoor restaurant dining, or Chicago, which never reopened restaurants in the first place, this study doesn’t matter. In other places, it probably does. I just checked, and the 7-day growth rate in Covid deaths just went from 6.0 to 6.1 percent. It’s been climbing relentlessly since two weeks ago when it was 4.0%, and it’s not likely to stop climbing anytime soon, given the astounding growth in new cases. This isn’t the time to be taking big chances, whether you’re making your personal dining choices or you run a city health department.

Of course, I'm very sympathetic to restaurant owners and workers whose livelihoods will be disrupted by further shutdowns. But the solution to their problems isn't to leave the restaurants open so they can spread the virus further. They need to be compensated as much as possible. The relief bill currently being considered includes an extension of the Paycheck Protection Program. That should help a lot of restaurant owners get through the coming shutdowns - whether imposed by local governments or just by their customers staying away in droves.

I would love to hear any comments or questions you have on this post. Drop me an email at tom@tomalrich.com.

 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The tragedy in India

For a great account of what’s going on in India, read this WaPo article. And read this Atlantic article for a good commentary on how India’s wealthier class ignored the lessons of the 1984 Bhopal disaster and let the health care system stagnate, leaving the country unable to handle this sudden surge in the virus. Although it's wrong to say the system stagnated. For the wealthy, it became (and remains) world-class. Does this remind you of another health care system that, at least in the early days of the pandemic, was overwhelmed?  Both articles call attention to the Modi government’s failures, but they both try to spread the blame around. Yes, others are responsible, but the fact that – after a terrible response to the first wave of the virus – the government got lulled into thinking they’d beaten it, so they could open up completely (including holding big political rallies and allowing the annual Kumbh Mela to take place – this year in Haridwar, which I’ve visited and can ...
Read more

The Indian variant

The numbers keep improving every week. Both new cases and deaths grew at the same 0.7% rate in the past week, vs. 0.9% for both cases and deaths the previous week. And average daily deaths in the past week were 573. For perspective, the last time deaths were this low was March 31, 2020. But given that daily deaths hadn’t gone above 10 until March 15, the fact that they’d accelerated to 468 on March 31 was a bad sign (at the time, my big concern was that total deaths would end up in the low tens of thousands. In fact, they passed 600,000 last week). This morning, WaPo ran a story on the new Indian variant’s arrival in Britain, where it passed 2,000 cases recently. It seems to be at least 50% more transmissible than what we used to call the UK variant, but which is now the dominant variant in both the US and Britain. And that variant in turn easily displaced what had been the previous dominant variant in both countries, since the beginning of the pandemic (in fact, I remember a lot o...
Read more

More than ever, we’re on our own

Leana Wen, a physician and former public health commissioner for Baltimore, wrote another great op-ed piece for the Post today entitled “We’ve reached 200,000 deaths. Our response has gotten even worse than it was at 100,000.” It makes the stark point: By the most important measures of public health, we’re doing worse on a national scale than we were in late May, when the US passed 100,000 Covid deaths. Here are some of her points: “In late May, we had about 20,000 new infections per day. Now we are at double that, with  around 40,000  new daily infections. This is a high baseline to have entering the fall and winter, when the combination of quarantine fatigue and cold weather could drive people to congregate indoors and substantially increase transmission.” “In addition, restrictions keep getting lifted, even in states with surging infections. The nearly 2  million  students returning for in-person instruction will surely lead to more outbreaks, as some colleg...
Read more