As COVID again sweeps across the country, it makes little sense to discuss broad based restrictions while leaving restaurant dining rooms open.
As everyone from Dr. Fauci to Dick Cheney knows, wearing a mask is the best way to reduce the spread of COVID. It is low cost, mildly inconvenient, and saves lives. Even indoor activities (like shopping or taking mass transit) can function with limited risk, when you wear a mask.
Except you can’t wear a mask while you are eating, which is why indoor dining seems to be a really bad idea.
Data supports that intuition. A detailed analysis of mobility data recently pre-published in Nature, shows that indoor dining was by far the largest driver of COVID spread in major metros early in the pandemic. Writers say that reducing capacity can help reduce transmission, but still is a high risk activity.
The tradeoff does not make sense when we are debating other measures like closing schools or more widespread lockdowns that have vast societal and economic costs.
Experts have suspected the risks of indoor dining for a while.
On September 30th, NYC started indoor dining. Rolling 7-day average positivity rate in New York on October 9th was 1.52% – slightly down after NY rolled out its microtargeting. Positivity rate in New York City has nearly doubled in 5 weeks.
Correlation is not causality. And shutting down dining rooms won’t solve stop COVID’s spread alone. Colder weather, Halloween, and post election celebrations are also probably having an impact.
But when the mechanism is clear, the data is sound, and real world anecdotal evidence consistent, it is tough to see why we are continuing to leave restaurant dining rooms open. The discontinuity is especially surprising in New York, where data driven decision making that has made the state a model for COVID management since the spring.
While policymakers debate indoor dining, NYC public schools will need to go back to all remote learning if positivity rates go above 3%. Given that evidence has shown schools, especially at the elementary level, don’t seem to drive high levels of COVID spread, the tradeoff doesn’t make sense.
The only way to justify leaving restaurant dining rooms open is economic -to protect the millions of jobs dependent on restaurants. Outdoor dining helped, but not enough to offset the losses. Going into the winter, that alone won’t be enough to keep restaurants afloat. However, it isn’t even clear restaurants cane make it on reduced capacity anyway.
In addition, some will say that a restaurant dining room shut down government would be signalling out one industry unfairly over others. That’s true. The pandemic is unfair – many industries are booming during the pandemic, others (those that rely on physical space) are struggling.
The better answer, as proposed by others, is for the government to make restaurants whole financially for keeping their dining rooms closed. Restaurants do roughly $75BB in business every month in the US.
Even if we paid them to keep dining rooms closed (and given revenue take out and outdoor dining, the number is likely less than the $75BB/month) for 4 months, the cost would be a small fraction of the pandemic’s overall economic impact. The payments could insist that restaurant owners use some of the proceeds to pay furloughed employees.
The data is pretty clear on indoor dining, and policymakers ought to act now – both on shutting dining rooms and getting restaurant owners the financial support they need.
The Great Refactoring 