Unsurprised

[owlmoose]

Brief pandemic stuff behind the cut.

Indoor dining in SF is shutting back down because of a 250% jump in COVID cases.

It's so obvious that indoor dining is a huge transmission source, and yet everyone keeps trying to put it high on the list of businesses to re-open. I do not understand, at all.

Not that this affects my life. I haven't set foot inside a restaurant since the second week of March except to pick up takeout, and I've only even eaten outdoors a couple of times, never at a place with table service. Why this is the thing that everyone is pushing to get back -- as opposed to schools, other types of workplaces, gatherings with friends and family, all of which seem higher priority, all of which can be done masked -- is totally beyond me.

Comments

[rionaleonhart]

I still can't believe the UK government literally paid people to start going back to restaurants and are now acting surprised that we're in a huge second wave. Who could have predicted that 'we'll pay half your restaurant bill in the middle of a pandemic' might have negative consequences?

[owlmoose]

Right?? When they could have used that money to, like, pay business owners to stay closed and keep paying their employees. Which frankly would have done everyone a lot more good.

[ladythmpr]

It's so obvious that indoor dining is a huge transmission source, and yet everyone keeps trying to put it high on the list of businesses to re-open. I do not understand, at all.

Partly because SF has a reputation for restaurants, and partly because there's a whole lot of people out of work when all the restaurants close. Not just the people who work in the restaurant, but all the suppliers, etc.

And people working so they can buy things to keep the economy going is IMPORTANT! /s

I suspect this is going to eventually trickle down to a lot of other indoor spaces that have reopened but require mask-wearing all the time.

Disclaimer:I'm little affected by the rollback because I haven't been inside a business since March that didn't sell groceries or prescriptions.

[lassarina]

^ this. Food service is a huge huge huge part of the economy, and restaurants doing delivery-only make an incredibly tiny portion of sales (and, because of the way food service works, waitstaff are the cheapest people to have because of tipped wage, so they don't save very much money on payroll dumping the front-of-house staff.)

[owlmoose]

Sure, of course restaurants are an important part of the economy, and the industry as a whole runs on razor-thin margins. I understand all that. But it continues to boggle my mind that anyone thinks we can run anything like a normal economy while a global pandemic is going on. All these attempts to focus on the economy while half-assing the pandemic response are part of what's kept it running full steam in the US all this time (instead of getting a period of relative relief during the summer like most of Europe and Asia). I find it all very frustrating.