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Comments
Does it help or hurt?
I don't know a lot about the business models in the restaurant business. Is it possible to run an eatery with ~25% capacity? My assumption is that it's a very low margin business that relies on volume and turnover and that a make-or-break number would be more in the 80% capacity range. It costs roughly the same to open the restaurant whether you have 1 or 100 customers, and I would think most places need the higher number.
Great, but no thanks
I was happy to see people waiting to eat the Birch St. yesterday but also no thanks, I'm sticking with take out through the summer at least.
nope
The state still has the equivalent of a reasonably full planeload of people dying per week and a couple of thousand new cases identified per week. Hard to believe this is going to go well as the Governor relaxes restrictions.
I'll pass too
Does anyone else think this is happening too fast? We haven't even seen if there's been any increase in cases from the recent and ongoing protests....
Nothing from the protests
At least from what I'm reading. Being outside and moving is about as safe as you can get short of staying completely isolated.
A big part of the total shutdown was to prevent hospitals from becoming overwhelmed. Now that cases are well down, the risk of not getting a hospital bed is much lower. But from a danger point of view, the virus will remain deadly until there's a vaccine or treatment.
So everyone needs to make their own decisions regarding their risk tolerance. Now that my risk of being hit by a car is higher than my risk of being killed by COVID, I'm not concerned about going to restaurants. But I'll keep distance from anyone who thinks they are high risk.
I think it is happening at a reasonable pace
Outdoor dining, properly distanced, is a good step to take. I also like this as it may "catch on" - if people like it enough, we will see more human-oriented spaces in the summer springing up everywhere.
If you look at how other states are handling things, MA is taking a very measured approach. The state is tracking how we are doing, and acting accordingly.
That may be true for your
That may be true for your sunurbs, but here in Boston we're dealing with density which ups the risk factor.
I'm with you, I miss PEOPLE,
I'm with you, I miss PEOPLE, like, I would like to visit with extended family and friends and coworkers without taking really extreme precautions, but I have no desire to sit in a restaurant, a movie theater, a hair salon, a car dealership, an airplane, etc etc.
I didn't actually care to do those things very often BEFORE Covid-19, so maybe you can discount my opinion, but it seems to me that restaurants and all this other crap actually AREN'T that essential, closing them down HAS been really effective to combat further outbreaks, and this whole thing is about kicking people off of unemployment (communicable illness be damned).
Not for me yet but seems data-driven
I’m a covid coward for personal reasons so I’m in no rush to join them (though I would desperately love to go order a beer at a bar), but we’re at very low levels of transmission in the city and it’s continued to decline steadily for 6+ weeks. That trend has held up even as we’ve reopened both officially and otherwise. We have a lot of testing capacity especially compared to March when the first wave was building under our noses. You can always argue to be more cautious but the current approach seems to be grounded in facts as best as we can know them.