There are many reasons why the restaurant industry and its workers are already banning indoor dining as the restaurant industry and its workers are facing economic ruin after months of drastic declines.
But on the question of COVID-19 safety, the science is clear: going for food is associated with an increased risk of coronavirus transmission.
David Grasky, one of the researchers in a recent study at Stanford University, said that people talk a lot about superstrider events, but there are also superstrador destinations – the types of places that are particularly dangerous and particularly high in infection rates. Spread of coronavirus in indoor space. “One of those types of spaces is full-service restaurants.”
Even before states embarked on the long road to reopening their economies, epidemiologists warned that the virus spreads most rapidly indoors. Many of the potential high-risk activities include indoor dining, which should only be resumed with extreme caution, if not at all.
Emerging science has only strengthened the initial fears of pathologists, said Tuthi, Gruski and others in the spring. Studies on mathematical modeling, cellphone data, physics, and epidemiology have been drawn up to confirm the emergence of meals during epidemics.
But despite hospital admissions and Massachusetts and nationwide officials in the reopening role, restaurant dining rooms in many places remain open and always controversially open.
Restaurant rent owners and the organizations they represent have vehemently defended the safety of their businesses, emphasizing the care and expense involved in complying with restrictions in Massachusetts, including keeping tables at least a foot apart, limiting the number of parties to six or fewer. Patrons ’meal time is 90 minutes and closes at 9:30 p.m.
And some owners and patrons alike have drawn attention to the data as if they were on their side: state contact tracing reports.
Massachusetts contact tracers have combined 84 Covid-19 clusters with restaurants, a small fraction of the state’s 23,888 known case clusters.
But scientists urge careful interpretation of that data. No. The so-called clusters, almost all – 22,487 as of Thursday’s report – are classified as “household spreads”, meaning that people living with two or more people became infected.
But that information “really won’t help us,” said Samuel Scorpino, an epidemiologist at Northeastern University. We know that people who live with it are more likely to spread the disease to each other, he explained, but the infected first household member had to get CO-Weed-19 somewhere else, then at work, running errands, or outside and in their community.
“What we have to do is figure out what to do [COVID-19] Entering homes, ”Scorpino said.
“It simply came to our notice then that we had very little information [from contact tracing] “About the sites of this transition at the end of the epidemic,” Harvard T.H. Said Mark Lipsich, professor of epidemiology at Chan School Public Health. Lipsich said the limitations of contact tracing are a national and international problem, not specific to Massachusetts.
But even with state contact tracing data providing little evidence of how the coronavirus is spread, both Scorpino and Lipsich felt confident that restaurants, and especially indoor dining, were dangerous.
Lipsich stressed that a wide range of research helps to explore the potential potential for the spread of COVID-19: modeling using real-world data to predict how many people will be infected under different open conditions; Case-controlled studies that compare the behavior of covid-positive people with those who are not infected; And basic physiological and epidemiological facts about how the virus itself is transmitted.
Lipsich said it specifies all types of research restaurants as a particularly high-risk activity. And the evidence is moving forward.
In September, the Centers for Disease Control released a case-control study that asked people who qualified to receive COVID-19 tests a list of places they had visited in the two weeks before the test.
Researchers have found that those who tested positive were twice as likely to report a meal in a restaurant, indoors or out, as compared to those who tested negative. Rest restaurants did not have a strong correlation with positive cases in any other setting like rent, one researcher attributed to the fact that people who eat and drink need to wear masks, while most do not do other activities.
In November, a group of Korean researchers took a closer look at how the transmission passes from person to person in restaurants. The study, led by Dr. Ju-Hyung Lee of Jeonbook National University Medical School, found that a rest restaurant runt erupted, spreading within five minutes. The two patrons are sitting more than 20 feet apart. A third person was also infected.
None of the three patrons with confirmed cases had direct contact, but researchers diverted the airflow in the restaurant and found that the ventilation system probably carried drips directly to the table.
Add to that the Stanford model, also released in November. Gruski and his fellow researchers used cellphone data to map how 98 million people moved to America’s 10 largest cities. They combined data with daily case counts reported from each city to model how coronavirus spreads when people visit in certain types of settings.
The model found that two mobility factors – how dense a given setting is and how long visitors stay – are closely related to the increased risk of Covid-19 transmission. It also predicts that the city’s decision to open a particular type of setting – full-service restaurants – counts more cases than other settings studied by researchers.
High-density and long-term investments are the restaurant’s “infrastructural features,” Grusky said, helping to explain why they are more under the model than other high-risk settings, including fitness centers, cafes and snack bars, and hotels and motels doing.
Leaving aside the models, case studies and ventilation diagrams, Lipsich said the inward dining COVID-19 is easy to spread – and is typical of coronaviruses rather than restaurants.
“Uncovered, especially open, mouth, loud talking and proximity and poor ventilation are contributors to coronavirus transmission. It’s all very clear, “he said.
The risk factors for this complete epidemic map on indoor dining are a little more than coincidental – it’s very unfortunate for the industry to struggle to stay afloat.
“There’s nothing mystical about the restaurant,” Lipsich said. “Then whether it’s a restaurant, or a gym, or a house of worship, or a room where you go with your best friends and Yodell. . . It’s just that certain activities spread the virus more effectively. “
Dasia Moore can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter daijmoore.
