Bay Area restaurants consider closing due to outdoor dining ban

https://www.sfchronicle.com/restaurants/article/Something-has-to-give-Bay-Area-restaurants-15774785.php

by jelliclesfarm • 6 years ago

44 84 6 years ago

I mean, I'm tolerant of most all the public health measures that are taken out of reasonable caution by the state+county authorities, but this feels like overkill.

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?

forgotmypw17• 6 years ago

Actually, evidence seems to point the other way:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25314732

howlgarnish• 6 years ago

That talks a lot about bad modeling, not outdoor eating?

iab• 6 years ago

Maybe it’s more like this is one actionable lever that the state can pull, so they pull it. Doesn’t feel like a data-driven decision.

zests• 6 years ago

"Do anything because we need to do something" is one of my biggest pet peeves. It is unfortunately common.

scarmig• 6 years ago

A lot of it is a panic mode--December is going to be a very cruel month. And if the medical system collapses under strain, a mob will be at public health officials' throats screaming bloody murder. "Why didn't you shut down restaurants when you could?" I don't envy their position.

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.

yellowapple• 6 years ago

I feel like we're going to end up with the opposite question: "What good were these lockdowns when the medical system collapsed anyway?"

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".

twblalock4• 6 years ago

A lot of it is a panic mode--December is going to be a very cruel month. And if the medical system collapses under strain, a mob will be at public health officials' throats screaming bloody murder. "Why didn't you shut down restaurants when you could?" I don't envy their position.

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?

JamesBarney2• 6 years ago

The biggest lever they could have pushed was releasing a vaccine earlier.

fibers• 6 years ago

if we only learned from china how to combat this

ppf2• 6 years ago

You mean, ignore it? It beggars belief that countries like New Zealand, which have significant geographical and population advantages over China, have had to work so hard to get where they are today, yet China was able to quietly beat it.

nradov2• 6 years ago

Scientists are investigating the possibility that deaths in Asia have been relatively low due to prior exposure to another similar coronavirus.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/scientists-investigate-whether-...

staticassertion3• 6 years ago

Townsend just closed, and I'm pretty upset about it. 40 years. The waiter was there for nearly 20 - an amazing guy. They had no intent to close, I used to see the owners bringing food to people, they'd talk to me, clearly loved their jobs.

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.

adinosaur123• 6 years ago

I headed to Townsend the other morning to grab breakfast and was surprised to see the sign. That's the fourth(!) "spot" that I used to visit regularly that has now permanently closed in my area.

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.

antpls• 6 years ago

Wouldn't a 40-years old restaurant have no debt to pay and a good treasury? I would assume they paid back any debt by then, and could survive for a long time without doing business

Bradlinc• 6 years ago

Maybe if the restaurant owned the building but otherwise the rent alone could chew through the profit of a restaurant or bar pretty fast. It is difficult to buy the building of a successful restaurant unless you had a right of first refusal or buyout option in the initial lease. Landlords are reluctant to sell you the building for anything reasonable if they feel you are successful as their money is fairly safe and inflation adjusted. I run two bars. One of them is five years old and very successful. I would say right now it has about eight months of rent payments until it would be a problem.

siliconmountain• 6 years ago

It’s been 9 months... they still have to pay rent and equipment costs and staff

xtiansimon3• 6 years ago

“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.”

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.

_se• 6 years ago

Don't be obtuse, it's quite obvious why a restaurant would close right now. You're really grasping at straws if you're trying to say that they've closed for any other reason.

staticassertion3• 6 years ago

I mean I literally talked to them about it.

mark-r• 6 years ago

Try living in Minneapolis, where outdoor seating is only practical for 6 months of the year - if that. I do feel sorry for restaurants everywhere though, and all the other myriad businesses wiped out by COVID.

throwawaysea• 6 years ago

Note that a judge recently blocked LA County from banning outdoor dining without evidence: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-12-02/covid-19...

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.

listless• 6 years ago

The downvotes on this are proof that people don’t want to navigate the benefit trade offs.

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.

twblalock4• 6 years ago

The state government has not provided evidence that outdoor dining is responsible for much of the spread.

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.

rllearneratwork• 6 years ago

>"The state government has not provided evidence that outdoor dining is responsible for much of the spread."

- 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.

jelliclesfarm4• 6 years ago

Meanwhile ..

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.

robot• 6 years ago

I was at downtown Woodside CA last week and outdoor dining area was packed. And this is one of the most conscious places. I believe with a limited number of people and distance rules outdoor activity is okay, but dense outdoor dining is suspicious.

Same with beach. beach is okay, a packed beach (try a popular one in half moon bay) might not be.

natchy• 6 years ago

and people are gathering with friends and relatives inside private homes more frequently than before

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.

gnicholas4• 6 years ago

Also, many sheriffs have said they will not enforce Newsom's order: https://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2020/12/05/stay-at-home-orde...

dheera• 6 years ago

Most outdoor dining I've seen in the bay area looks downright scary to me.

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.

gnicholas4• 6 years ago

The state government has not provided evidence that outdoor dining is responsible for much of the spread.

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...

briefcomment• 6 years ago

Things that are contagious and invisible cause people to act like lunatics. On top of that, the enforcers are hypocritical. What a mess.

See https://twitter.com/justin_hart/status/1335016414315307009

monological• 6 years ago

A study was just released by Stanford University with the objective of estimating the infection fatality rate of COVID-19. The results are as follows: "In people < 70 years, infection fatality rates ranged from 0.00% to 0.31% with crude and corrected medians of 0.05%."[0]

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

gexla• 6 years ago

On the other hand, we don't want hospitals filling up past their limits and putting tremendous strain on health care workers.

This seems like it's the only thing which matters. Having a working health care system is one of the pillars of modern society?

serjester• 6 years ago

On one extreme, I'm sure most people would agree it's not worth spending millions of dollars to add months to the lives of geriatric patients. How much collateral damage are we willing to endure to add another 9 to the probability a senior citizen doesn't die from the pandemic? It's a balancing act.

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.

pmoriarty5• 6 years ago

The IFR would be worse if medical care wasn't available because of hospitals being over-capacity and health care workers burning out (or dying themselves). Fatalities from other causes would increase too (as they're already doing due to people avoiding medical care due to fear of infection at hospitals). The absolute number of dead would also rise were the lockdowns not in place. Just how many people do we want to sacrifice to keep restaurants open?

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?

indecisive_user3• 6 years ago

People who survive can have very serious complications.

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

onecommentman• 6 years ago

“Just how many people do we want to sacrifice to keep restaurants open?”

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.

superkuh• 6 years ago

If you look at the plots of the data sources from the meta-survey of literature that is [0] you'll notice the IFR positively correlated with high population and infrastructure. These places get a better idea of the actual IFR and are diluted out by places that falsify data (China) and aren't capable of taking real population level data (smaller and undeveloped countries).

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.

beaunative• 6 years ago

Actions could have been taken, and the cost of those actions could be much lower. It's because we keep comparing those numbers that we forget what really matters. The only reason economy matter is because people matter.

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.

nostrademons2• 6 years ago

Humans are really bad at judging risk. Here's a sample of your odds of dying from a variety of causes as a 15-45 year old, sourced from the CDC [1][2] and your paper, and assuming there are about 45 million Americans in the 15-45 year old age range:

  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]

(COVID and influenza are infection fatality rates, the rest are rates among the general population. If you live in a wealthy neighborhood and don't have guns in the house your risks from suicide, homicide, and terrorism are basically nil, while if you're in West Baltimore they're much worse.)

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...

bryanlarsen2• 6 years ago

1. Isolating just those above 70 is both cruel and impossible. The old and vulnerable need significant amounts of care.

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.

tfehring2• 6 years ago

This shouldn't be a choice between risking continued transmission of a pandemic disease and letting small businesses fail. The US collectively produces way more than enough to keep them afloat until the end of the pandemic; the only reason for the dichotomy is Congress's failure to pass enough aid funding to provide that support. As far as I'm concerned, congressional Republicans - and in turn, everyone who voted for them - are ultimately responsible for the failure of every small business that shutters due to the pandemic, due to their absurd insistence on legal indemnity for employers whose employees get COVID due to unsafe working environments.

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.

nradov2• 6 years ago

The fault is not with Congress. The federal government hasn't forced any businesses to close. All of the lockdown measures have been imposed by state and local governments so they are the ones that should subsidize impacted businesses.

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.

tfehring2• 6 years ago

State-level funding sounds good on paper but would work poorly in practice because the federal government benefits from its sovereignty in ways that state governments don't. The vast majority of Americans' tax revenue goes to the federal government, not to state or local governments, even in wealthy, high-tax states like California. And state governments, unlike the federal government, don't have access to effectively unlimited borrowing capacity at <2% interest. Also, California can't shut down its border to Floridians - or prevent Californians from traveling to Florida and then returning - to stop the virus from being carried from Florida to California.

ookblah• 6 years ago

I think the people who keep pushing on "freedom to choose" and what not do not understand human nature, as if these laws are the only thing stopping restaurants from enjoying economic success. I know business owners want to peg their hopes on that.

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.

justinzollars• 6 years ago

It feels like we are living through a second Great Depression. A number of my favorite San Francisco businesses have permanently closed and it's an incredibly sad time to live through such a thing.

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

I can't see how any business can operate in these conditions. It certainly feels like Government is playing favorites, dubbing big box stores as safe - while small businesses that made San Francisco a great place to live are falling on the knife.

jelliclesfarm4• 6 years ago

What is missing is the number of agricultural workers who are being disproportionately affected. They still have to work as essential workers.

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

Bay Area restaurants consider closing due to outdoor dining ban

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