Bay Area restaurants consider closing due to outdoor dining ban
sfchronicle.com
sfchronicle.com
Just so sad to see it go. Restaurants make a city. They're critical to its culture and the lifestyle of those who live there.
I don't know that this is the right or wrong decision, but it's just awful that this is happening, and we need to acknowledge how fucking terribly this has been handled.
Does anyone know where the state/city legislature is hosted online? I'm genuinely curious on what the laws are that give officials authority to close businesses like they have over the past 9 months.
I don’t understand how you can draw the conclusion. There are many reasons you might take the opportunity to bow out of a business after 40 years. Let alone in the restaurant industry. Was their lease up? Sad, true. But, smoking gun? You don’t know the restaurant industry.
COVID is the situation and restaurants are among the industries hit the hardest by airborne disease spread indoors. Sheesh. Maybe I'm reading too much into a flip cursing comment suggesting there's _a person_, or _agency_ who deserves blame. I think it's more likely doubt and anxiety underlying that comment. Anxiety about _our own_ uncertain future, and grief in dealing with loss. And for that you have my sympathies. We are all touched by this disease.
I'm not sure what you mean with regards to a person or agency. There are multiple people and agencies that failed drastically here.
At the same time, people have been travelling for Thanksgiving, and people are gathering with friends and relatives inside private homes more frequently than before. That isn't going to stop happening. If restaurants are closed, that might happen even more often, because there is nowhere else to do it!
Law enforcement in parts of the state have already told us that they won't enforce curfews, or won't use curfews as probable cause for stopping people who are out and about. So, stay-at-home orders won't prevent private gatherings and travel from continuing to happen.
The only way to actually stop the spread is to prevent people from having physical contact with people from other households, and we clearly aren't willing to do that. Orders to stop outdoor dining are going to kill businesses and cause people to lose their jobs for minimal public health gain.
- This is outrageous. This is the same government who has been shutting beaches in Northern California few months ago, despite all the "science" (which they claim to follow) pointing to the fact that outdoor transmission is very unlikely.
https://www.gov.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/12.3.20-St... : what the regional order says..
It’s really weird. We can’t eat outdoors but can congregate indoors. We can worship together and participate in protests, but can’t use outdoor playgrounds.
They'd prohibit both religious gatherings and protests if they legally could. These are both explicitly listed as protected under the 1st Amendment to the U.S. constitution, so it wouldn't survive a court challenge, especially since a similar restriction from New York has already been struck down as unconstitutional.
Same with beach. beach is okay, a packed beach (try a popular one in half moon bay) might not be.
There are 54 counties in California. Only 41 counties have mandatory lockdown.
We didn't learn our lesson from the war on drugs. When you make something completely off limits people will find a way to engage, but without any standards.
Meeting people in secret (mask free) is the new drugs.
1. Newsom's authority is not respected by law enforcement
2. Law enforcement thinks the curfew is not necessary
3. Law enforcement doesn't enjoy a governor springing new rules on them without advance notice, which is the result of his making things up as he goes along
This is little league stuff. It's not the way a state in a first-world country should be operating.
1. County sheriffs only have direct jurisdiction over unincorporated areas, which are typically rural and are unlikely to be a significant source of spread.
2. These orders are likely intended to give local governments stronger authority to shut down gatherings, should they choose to use it.
3. Even if local authorities refuse to enforce the orders, there are no explicitly COVID-19 liability protections for businesses that I'm aware of. If an outbreak occurs that can be traced back to a business that was operating against regulations, that in and of itself would make the business operators jointly (if not entirely) liable, and would give insurance companies a defensible reason for not paying out claims.
The counties discussed in the linked article are Orange County, Riverside, and other similar counties. These are not "the boonies".
Separately, do you really think that if the OC Sheriff says "we are not enforcing Newsom's rules" that the deputies are going to enforce those rules in cities within their patrol areas? If a Sheriff has decided not to enforce a law in his jurisdiction, why would he direct his deputies to enforce that same law in other parts of his patrol area?
I live in Southern California, one of the areas of currently under a state mandated stay-at-home order.
And I never said unincorporated areas where unpopulated, I said they were rural, which implies that they're sparsely populated. This is partly by definition (a city would either be part of an urban center, or its own urban center), and partly because populations that are dense enough tend to form cities.
And to be clear, when I refer to "city", I'm referring to incorporated cities, not just major cities.
> Separately, do you really think that if the OC Sheriff says "we are not enforcing Newsom's rules" that the deputies are going to enforce those rules in cities within their patrol areas? If a Sheriff has decided not to enforce a law in his jurisdiction, why would he direct his deputies to enforce that same law in other parts of his patrol area?
Yes.
Again, Sheriffs only have direct jurisdiction over unincorporated areas of the county. Cities are their own jurisdiction. The cities may contract with the Sheriff for policing, but the deputies would be following the direction of the city government in that case. If the city directs their police to enforce a stay-at-home order (be it the city's own police or Sheriff deputies policing on behalf of the city), the police would have no legal basis to refuse. They may not be able to practically enforce such an order, but that's a different issue.
Both my farms are in unincorporated towns. There is no police dept. I have to call the sheriff’s office. Entirely diff jurisdiction.
The guideline is 2 meters of distance WITH masks; considering eating can't be done with masks I'd want at least 6+ meters of distance without masks, and in reality many of them don't even meet 2 meters.
Add to that wait staff who aren't wearing a proper KN95 or N95 masks while serving dozens of customers; many of them have only surgical or cloth masks which wouldn't make safe handling my food.
I'm also in a risk group for COVID though so I'm extra cautious.
When Los Angeles County recently ordered outdoor dining to be shut down, they were sued. A judge just ruled that the county must provide evidence linking outdoor dining to COVID spread: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-12-02/covid-19...
Is there strong evidence that outdoor eating is causing significant transmission? Enough to impose this cost on a struggling sector?
We're in the phase now where we understand enough to be more targeted aren't we?
I worry that this will end up being counterproductive, though. Probably the net number of people meeting other people will go down. However, of those who still meet other people, they will likely meet somewhere indoors (someone's home for dinner), which is much more dangerous than outdoor dining.
The current lockdown strategies, like with many political measures, seem to be more motivated by "we need to look like we're doing something" than "we need to fix the problem".
What they should be screaming is, "Why did you squander the last lockdown? Why aren't we testing and tracing on massive scale? Why didn't we build more hospital capacity in the time we had?"
The state squandered the time we bought ourselves with the last lockdown. For example, where is the army of contact tracers we were supposed to hire?
https://www.aamc.org/news-insights/i-m-contact-tracer-san-fr...
The San Mateo fairgrounds has a field hospital setup that's currently unused, and I understand that Santa Clara County has a couple as well. The equipment is currently being moved into real hospitals because staffing and equipment is apparently more of a bottleneck than space.
The problem is that nothing can stop an exponential curve other than bringing the exponent under 1.0. You can delay by minimizing it, but an Rt of 1.2 vs 2.0 just means it doubles in 4 weeks rather than 1. You're still screwed, you just have longer to get there.
OP talks about how people will be coming with pitchforks for public health officials. I think more ire will be directed at national public health officials than state and local ones. The national ones obviously screwed up when it came to messaging regarding masks, and I think less obviously but just as importantly screwed up when it game to rolling out the vaccine.
These decisions are probably more impactful than the decisions state and local health officials made around whether bars are open or not.
They just do batch tests and mix samples in groups, if positive, test again. My father did one a few months ago after returning from Qingdao, where there were a small outbreak then in a hospital.
China is really good at doing things at scale and honestly US is nowhere close (too slow and too inefficient, from what I see here in Santa Clara)
The main difficulty is getting everyone to give a sample but with China’s level of social cohesion and control that is a solved problem.
While in China, it's like putting sparks off here and there, but most of people are not affected. If the problem can be solved by money, it's not a real problem.
The numbers are generally small (maximum a hundredful), so not difficult to handle.
Most of China has not had any lockdowns since July. I wish I could travel.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/scientists-investigate-whether-...
Is it right to shut down the entire economy with these statistics or are people overreacting? High risk individuals do have the option to get food delivered to their home, if they're afraid of contracting the virus. Shouldn't they also be able to make that decision for themselves, if they're OK with taking that risk or not?
On the other hand, we don't want hospitals filling up past their limits and putting tremendous strain on health care workers. It's definitely a tricky situation.
[0]: https://www.who.int/bulletin/online_first/BLT.20.265892.pdf
This seems like it's the only thing which matters. Having a working health care system is one of the pillars of modern society?
I don't pretend to know the answer, but in general I am opposed to another shutdown given how much we've progressed in handling this disease.
On a side note, I'm not a fan of how the 15% rule makes it seem like we're on the brink of being overrun - you have to keep in mind 60 to 80% of hospital beds are occupied by non-covid patients.
Also, fatalities aren't the only thing we have to worry about. People who survive can have very serious complications.
Finally, why should we only look at the effects on people younger than 70?
This is true of several respiratory illnesses. For example there's evidence that the flu can increase the chance of a cardiovascular event for several months after recovery[0]. Is there evidence that covid has more severe long term complications than other respiratory illnesses?
>why should we only look at the effects on people younger than 70?
We shouldn't, of course. However we also shouldn't base policy off of a minority of the high risk population. Older people are also at a much higher risk of auto accidents. Instead of making the license process more difficult for everyone, several states have rules specifically for older people mandating more frequent vision tests and license renewals.
Instead of banning a low risk activity for a mostly low risk group, why don't we put resources into taking care of the high risk population(free grocery/medicine delivery, prioritized telehealth appointments, etc.) and let everyone else take care of their own risk assessment?
[0]https://academic.oup.com/eurheartj/article/29/1/96/2398118
I have a very hard time imagining that restaurant closings or any other lockdown measures are ever going to lead to this scale of death.
[1] - https://www.adn.com/nation-world/2020/12/03/more-than-2800-a...
Just how many lives do we save by keeping restaurants open? Healthier food, portion control, emotional health? People sacrifice their lives to eat in restaurants...implicitly, when they drive a car to/from and risk an auto accident. It is probably small numbers against small numbers...and erring on the side of choice and economic activity is a standard US thing.
The poster didn’t propose to ignore effects on the 70+...where did you read this?
It would have been wiser had the government health communicators introduced the notion of QALY to the US public at the start of this COVID event.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16877455/
Anyone dealing with aging parents is painfully aware of the need to balance remaining length of patient life with quality of life, including caregivers. The rest of the US needs to grow up about this. Politicians avoid talking about this...too much like leaving Grandma on the ice floe. It’s the medical/public health professionals role to do that.
You tell me. How many?
"People sacrifice their lives to eat in restaurants...implicitly, when they drive a car to/from and risk an auto accident. It is probably small numbers against small numbers"
Like I said elsewhere in this thread, just the other day the US had over 3,000 COVID-19 deaths in a single day. That doesn't sound like a small number to me, and I'd be surprised if anywhere near that number of people died driving to a restaurant that day.
"The poster didn’t propose to ignore effects on the 70+...where did you read this?"
Right. They just happened to only quote the IFR rate for people < 70 years old, and not mention the IFR for people 70 and older. That sounds like they ignored them to me.
Based on the available evidence, I think the number is close to zero.
>Restaurants have been mandated by the state to impose certain regulations and hygiene measures. They follow the general principles of harm reduction that Monica Gandhi[0], an infectious disease expert at UCSF, goes by: masks, distancing, ventilation and hand hygiene. "There is no evidence that I can find anywhere in the world that outdoor dining with those four procedures in play increases the risk of COVID-19," she said. [1]
So there seems to be no evidence that banning outdoor dining is going to do anything positive in stopping the spread, though we know for certain it will have destructive effects on people's well being and the economy.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monica_Gandhi
[1] https://www.houstonchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Is-outdoor-...
Instead you answered a question I didn't ask: how many lives would be lost by allowing outdoor dining.
Two completely different questions.
However, if one of the requirements for making outdoor dining safe is to wear masks, I don't see how it can be made safe, since as far as I know people can't eat or drink with masks on.
Furthermore, at least in my own informal witnessing of people dining outdoors, the norm is for people to socialize at tables without masks, with only a couple of feet between them. I wouldn't call that social distancing either.
That's two strikes against outdoor dining: lack of masks and lack of social distancing.
I'd love to have asked that UCSF expert what she had to say about this.
Something else to consider is that restaurants aren't only doing poorly because they're being locked down, but even when they're open many people are choosing (very sensibly, from my perspective) to avoid them. That won't be fixed by ending lockdowns.
Anyway, I'm still waiting to hear someone tell me how many lives would be saved by allowing restaurants to open. Is it going to be anywhere near 3,000 in a single day? Somehow I very much doubt it.
>I don't see how it can be made safe, since as far as I know people can't eat or drink with masks on.
Clearly the principles of harm reduction discussed in the article account for patrons eating without a mask on while they are seated at a table, but I suspect you already knew that.
>I'd love to have asked that UCSF expert what she had to say about this.
I'd love to hear what she would have to say as well. Though seeing as she has a long career studying infectious diseases and has studied covid extensively over the past year, I'm inclined to think she has a good understanding of the risks involved in certain activities, certainly beyond the anecdotal evidence of commenters on HN.
>I'm still waiting to hear someone tell me how many lives would be saved by allowing restaurants to open. Is it going to be anywhere near 3,000 in a single day? Somehow I very much doubt it.
I'm not sure why you're waiting for this answer. The number of deaths in a day(3000) is unrelated to restaurants allowing outdoor dining, so why are you comparing them? Closing restaurants will not bring that number down, based on the science we have available, but if you have evidence that suggests otherwise feel free to share.
Banning abortion saves lives too. Also motorcycles.
> ...but even when they're open many people are choosing (very sensibly, from my perspective) to avoid them
We should just open them then if nobody is going to go to them. In one breath you say we need to restrict them and in the other breath you say nobody will go. "I don't like to go there any more, it's too crowded" -- Yogi Berra
Another amazing feat of physics - like masks. When Covid cases go up it's because people aren't wearing masks. When the CDC and other international organizations record near-zero flu deaths for the year 2020 it's due to mask usage.
Somehow both things are happening at the same time.
Except for banning abortion, none of those things has a chance of actually being made illegal any time soon, so no use talking about any of them. And I don't think getting in to an argument about abortion in this thread would be productive.
Let's see what else you've got...
"We should just open them then if nobody is going to go to them. In one breath you say we need to restrict them and in the other breath you say nobody will go."
Except some highly inconsiderate, ignorant, and/or stupid people are still going. It's those we have to worry about. So I'd vote to keep them closed.
"Another amazing feat of physics - like masks. When Covid cases go up it's because people aren't wearing masks. When the CDC and other international organizations record near-zero flu deaths for the year 2020 it's due to mask usage."
You know, it could be both? Because the flu might not be as contagious, and there are other measures being used as well, like increased hand washing, which might be more effective for preventing the flu than preventing COVID-19. And even if all the measures are equally effective, there just might not be as much flu going around this year. Anyway, the fact that flu deaths are also going down, probably due to some of the lockdown, mask, and distancing measures is is even more reason to continue them.
The first part of the paper is justifying this choice as to not dilute out the measurements from the small regions. I guess if you hang a lampshade on it like that it almost makes sense this paper was approved. But it's easily misinterpreted.
Even if those restaurants would be having a difficult time, or even close their businesses. I don't think those people work there would just die. Unlike those "high-risk individuals" you just so causality decide don't matter.
It is ridiculous.
Drug overdose: 1 in 1000
COVID: 1 in 2000
Suicide: 1 in 2000
Car accident: 1 in 2500
[any gun-related death]: 1 in 2500
Homicide: 1 in 3000
The flu: 1 in 20,000
Struck by lighting: 1 in a million
Terrorism: 1 in ~100 million [3]
You be the judge from that. Personally I consider COVID worrisome enough to take sensible precautions and endure some inconveniences, but not the end of the world (well, personally. It may be the end of many societies, possibly even including the U.S). The #1 health risk that people seem to undervalue is "Don't do drugs", and the #1 most overvalued is the "War on Terrorism". It's interesting how many infringements of our civil liberties and economic life we put up with in the name of curbing terrorism, when median number of terrorist deaths in the U.S. per year is 4, and COVID is 50,000 times more likely to kill us.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/pdf/leading_causes_of_dea...
[2] https://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/pdf/leading_causes_of_inj...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_in_the_United_States...
2. 0.05% of hundreds of millions is still a lot of people. (And the number is far higher than that because it's impossible to isolate the >70)
3. the entire economy isn't shut down, far from it. At this point, it's on the order of a 5% hit. The pain is unevenly spread. A competent government would spread the burden.
4. If you were immuno-compromised, would you want your food delivered by the people traveling through multiple busy dining rooms?
5. Vaccines are just weeks away for the vulnerable, and mass vaccination a few months. The virus is spreading quickly, so just a little bit more isolation for a little bit longer will save hundreds of thousands of lives. Saving hundreds of thousands of lives might not be worth it if we had to shut down for years, but if shutting down for a couple months can save that many, it seems much more reasonable.
6. Your 0.05% figure assumes that hospitals and staff aren't overwhelmed. The figure increases dramatically when they are.
To be clear, as a lot of other commenters have pointed out, it doesn't seem to be well established how risky activities like outdoor dining are. If it were a question of whether it were worth an additional $X billion in aid to prevent that risk, great, that's a conversation that's worth having. But you can't have that kind of meaningful conversation starting from an ultimatum, as we are today.
The Florida state government allows restaurants in that state to remain open so why should Floridians pay to keep California restaurants running? There's nothing stopping the California legislature from raising taxes on the wealthy to fund pandemic relief in our state.
Look at other countries where everything is nearly completely open. Dining, theaters, etc are still down revenue wise. There will be ebbs and flows were people get sick of staying in and COVID fatigued and go dine out, then as cases or hospitalizations rise they naturally self distance or stay in.
A restaurant might be able to survive that, but it's punishing and I'm willing to bet most won't. You can't just stop and start a restaurant on a whim. Look at NYC where Broadway made a pre-emptive decision to shut down until May of next year because of crap like that.
I guess leave it up to us Americans to fly in the face of common sense, though.
It is not so much as masking protocols or social distancing. They car pool or the labour contractor picks them up in a van to take them to the fields. Many live in groups with 2-4 people to a room.
This is reality. Outside the tech bubble. This is why I am disappointed that Agtech and tech sector has done NOTHING to help the most vulnerable. It’s just faffing around, harvesting data and twirling three times after chanting ‘blockchain..blockchain..blockchain’ in agtech. If any, it’s for commodity crops like soy or corn harvested once a year and turned into fodder sludge or ethanol.
But farms that grow food have laborers working there every day. This is surreal and I am beyond heartbroken that nothing is being done to alleviate the problem that is most dangerous.
I posted this elsewhere: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25320797
This is a small list of a few of my personal favorite places that are gone:
* The San Francisco Hound Lounge
* Walzwerk East German Restaurant
* Old Jerusalem Restaurant
* Lucky 13
See https://twitter.com/justin_hart/status/1335016414315307009
I can’t help but think that a lot of people have been whipped up into an irrational level of panic, and they’re unable to navigate the risk benefit tradeoffs calmly. Add to that the politicization of this issue, and people have become very set in their stance of being pro lockdown versus against lockdown. This has led to them expecting authoritarian mandates from politicians to help them not feel so panicked.
The politicians themselves feel they have to issue the mandates this cohort expects even though they don’t believe in those mandates themselves. This is why so many politicians have been caught violating their own rules (https://thefederalist.com/2020/12/03/rules-for-thee-but-not-...) - it’s not that they think they’re above the rules (although it plays a part) as much as the fact that they don’t believe in them.
The reality is that life comes with risks. We will never face zero risks. We still need to go about with our lives and retain the freedom to make our own choices and evaluations of which risks we are willing to accept. Arbitrary actions like banning outdoor dining are a step too far.
I just feel sad. Sad for people who have died from this. Sad for their loved ones. Sad for small business. Sad for people who were already struggling. Sad for my own children. This is just awful no matter how you slice it. We’ve got to acknowledge that we only have awful outcomes to pick from. We just disagree on which outcome is less awful and I’m sad that we can’t even do that.