This page is fascinating (and disturbing) b/c it shows where the number of cases at specific businesses and list of locations that are non-compliant (each sub-list is scrollable).
At least restaurants were given a couple days notice this time and i get wanting to respond quickly to rising numbers. It would be nice if there was more back and forth / open communication with restaurant owners.
As of Monday, Pasadena (which has its own Health Dept) is not stopping outdoor dining. I’m not sure how to think about this, though have concerns that will result in people from surrounding areas coming here to eat.
The weekend before my symptoms appeared, for the first time in four months, I met friends for two dinners at two socially distanced patio tables. Nobody is required to wear masks at the tables, so I removed my mask when I sat, as did my dining partners, and we left them off during the entire time we were at the table.
He shared a table with people who were not in his household. Twice in one weekend. The tables were socially distanced (sounds like restaurants), he and his friends were not.
Typically, federal law trumps state law, which trumps county law, which trumps city law, etc. So for Corona-19, you would assume that whatever is the most restrictive ordinance at any level is the one that applies.
(Side note: There are exceptions to that hierarchical pattern, like insurance law, where the feds, in many cases, will leave everything up to the states.)
Restaurant owners feel like they’ve followed the rules and thus it’s unfair to be shut down, but it’s their customers who have been flouting the rules by meeting up with people not in their households.
I fail to see the logic of shutting down outdoor dining.
I would think that for a group of people from several different households outdoor dining in a restaurant is somewhat safer than indoor dining at home.
So now that same group of people order take out and aggregate at home without masks.
I guess we are at a point of the pandemic where any meeting of people not within one household should be avoided (which includes outdoor dining). Obviously it would be important that this also doesn’t happen in a private home but this is hard to control for any government and so they restrict/control what they can do.
I would imagine most people who plan to meet other people for dinner will just move their plans to home rather than cancel.
So the way I see it, this is pushing people from safer outdoor dining to less safe indoor home dining.
To dine safely with members of different households, people need to be outside and keep distance between the groups.
If restaurants checked IDs to make sure that they weren’t seating members of different households at the same table, it would be about as safe. Absent that, they’re tacitly encouraging irresponsible behavior.
Yeah… saying that it will drive people to dine in with others at home is a false equivalency… It may happen to some degree… but I have a mostly 20s-30s staff and they are 100% more likely to say… “Lets go out to brunch” than say… “Come to my Tiny @$$ apartment and have brunch that I made/postmated”.
Good point. I really enjoyed meeting up w/ friends (and even then, it was just “one at a time”) to eat out somewhere pre-pandemic. I have felt no strong urge to invite people over to eat takeout in our residence…
We recently had dinner with friends at a popular local restaurant; five of us from three households, at three separate and socially-distanced tables. We were the only ones there at opening time, but the restaurant filled to (socially-distanced) capacity while we were there. The patio was covered with a canopy; we all sat in a row along one edge/corner so had fresh air and comparative isolation, but it still felt too enclosed. And we had to raise our voices to talk over the distance our tables spanned, as well as to be heard over the other patrons.
The food and company were good, and the restaurant followed the rules, but it was still a rather uncomfortable experience and I wished afterward that he hadn’t done it (it will be more enjoyable in future memory, assuming nobody gets sick!).
We’ve decided to limit our outdoor dining (we live near Pasadena so will have options) to just the two of us, at restaurants with no canopies or side panels, and only if they have LOTS of space between tables and not many patrons. I guess it means eating a lot earlier than we’d like to, but it’s just not worth going out if we don’t feel comfortable.