Syracuse, N.Y. — Restaurants and bars across New York have been shut down, threatened with fines, and generally put under various heavy and ever-changing restrictions since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic in March.
Most complied, while some are giving up and closing either temporarily or permanently, as Gov. Andrew Cuomo and other officials repeatedly warn that dining out is a significant contributor to the spread of the virus.
Then on Friday, Cuomo produced a chart showing the risks of coronavirus exposure due to various activities, covering the period of September, October and November, when cases numbers began to escalate.
Topping the list (see below) was “household/social gatherings,” linked to 73.8% of the exposures. Health-care delivery was a distant second at 7.8%. It was followed by college students and education workers.
Further down, at No. 5, “restaurants & bars” were linked to 1.4% of exposures.
That caught the attention of people in the embattled dining industry.
“A (restaurant industry) thread I’m on blew up with about 40 messages right away,” said Dan Seeley, co-owner of The Cider Mill in Taunton. “We take all the precautions, and follow all these rules ... and then it seems like we’re being made the whipping boy when the evidence just isn’t there.”
“I just watched Cuomo use the CDC (Centers for Disease Control) to support not being indoors without masks,” said Mark Bullis, owner of the Bull & Bear Roadhouse restaurants in Syracuse’s suburbs. “The only place to sit indoors without a mask is a restaurant. So he uses that to justify the restrictions on restaurants and says he follows the data. But the data just doesn’t show it.
“It’s political,” Bullis said. “They have to do something, but with this they’re destroying lives and livelihoods.”
Bud Loura, a local dining industry consultant with his company RestaurantQB, said the chart shows what many in the business have suspected all along.
“They (the restaurant restrictions) are actually driving people to stay home, where the risk seems to be,” he said. “And they’re keeping people out of restaurants which are working hard to sanitize and clean, and enforce masks and which are safe.
“Your buddy who comes to your house for a beer isn’t wearing a mask,” Loura said. “Nobody is sanitizing your couch.”
Cuomo and others have often referred to science-based guidance when imposing restrictions, including those for restaurants.
As recently as Dec. 4, the CDC’s guidance, cited by Cuomo, included this language: “Exposures at nonessential indoor settings and crowded outdoor settings pose a preventable risk to all participants. ... Indoor venues, where distancing is not maintained and consistent use of face masks is not possible (e.g., restaurant dining), have been identified as particularly high-risk scenarios.”
Brian Leydet, an assistant professor of epidemiology and infectious disease at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry, cautioned against reading too much into the apparently low 1.4% risk factor at restaurants.
“Any time you take a mask off that creates an increased risk of transmission,” he said. “At a restaurant, you sit without a mask, often for an extended period of time. To an epidemiologist, that creates an increased risk.”
He also suspects the 1.4% figure “could be low.” That’s because it’s difficult to do thorough contact tracing of cases linked to public places like restaurants.
“It’s hard to completely determine what did or didn’t happen at a restaurant,” Leydet said. “It’s hard to know precisely who was at a specific place at a specific time.”
It’s easier in a location such as a school, he said, because that’s a more controlled environment. “At school, they know who was there and when,” he said.
And, he points out, 1.4% of a large number of cases is still significant.
He noted that Onondaga County Executive Ryan McMahon reported more than 400 new cases on Friday.
“Even at 1.4 or so percent, that’s potentially four new cases from restaurants,” Leydet said. “And who knows where it spreads from there.”
In his briefing Friday, Cuomo took note of restaurants’ position at No. 5 among 30 risk factors. Most of those below showed a risk of less than 1%.
“ ... Then you have restaurants and bars, so (restricting) restaurants and bars again are the CDC recommendation and restaurants and bars, inside, indoors, ... is one of the few areas that we think we can actually make a difference,” Cuomo said.
Meanwhile, Cuomo has reimposed a complete shutdown of indoor dining in New York City, and is looking at tightening or adjusting the restrictions further in other parts of the state. Indoor dining is currently prohibited in most of the city of Syracuse, and parts of DeWitt, Solvay and Lyncourt, with table and capacity limits in other areas.
“It’s just horrible,” said Seeley at The Cider Mill restaurant. “Nobody here is saying the virus isn’t serious. It’s just a matter of how these restrictions are applied and why.”
Gov. Andrew Cuomo provided this chart Friday showing the relative risk of 30 different activities.
MORE ON DINING OUT AND THE CORONAVIRUS
Why more CNY restaurants and bars are opting to shut down and wait for better times
McMahon, Walsh block ‘egregious’ food delivery fees by capping them at 15%
In restricted zones or not, CNY restaurants seeing fewer diners
No dining inside for Syracuse, some suburbs: ‘I don’t even have tears to cry anymore’
Don Cazentre writes for NYup.com, syracuse.com and The Post-Standard. Reach him at dcazentre@nyup.com, or follow him at NYup.com, on Twitter or Facebook.
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December 12, 2020 at 07:30PM
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CNY restaurants angry as new data seems to show low risk of coronavirus exposure - syracuse.com
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