Indoor food: it’s still the safest way to avoid it, even if more states allow it

Indoor food: it’s still the safest way to avoid it, even if more states allow it

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Despite the large number of cases, more state and city restaurants are leaving their doors open for diners, albeit with restrictions.
Last Friday, Los Angeles said its restaurants could reopen with restrictions and 50% capacity. Chicago reopens with rules encouraging physical distance and masks. New York has announced that restaurants can reopen just in time for Valentine’s Day with 25% capacity.

Dr Anthony Fauci said on Tuesday that it could be eaten inside a pandemic, but only if “done carefully”.

“When you eat indoors, you do it in a spacious place where you do not sit right next to each other,” the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases told CN LN Don Lemon. “Good airflow” is the key, he said. What you want to avoid is to inhale other people’s exhaled breath, which is cold with viruses.

Fauci said he feels for the restaurants devastated by the pandemic. Sales of restaurant and food service industries fell by $ 240 billion in 2020, according to the National Restaurant Association.

“You know, people sometimes think that public health officials are unaware of the economic considerations. Not at all – I mean, we’re very empathetic about it,” Fauci said. “But we still have to maintain public health measures if we are going to get the arm around this outbreak.”

However, you will not catch Linsey Marr at a restaurant this Valentine’s Day. Marr is a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Virginia Tech, who studied Covid-19 transfer. She said when she and her family drove to Colorado over Christmas, they stopped at a restaurant, took out and ate outside.
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“It was 30 degrees, but we were properly dressed. You can do that,” Marr said.

Marr is amazed at the tendency to reopen indoor dining. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the safest way to enjoy and support restaurants is to take out food.

“I do not know why restaurants reopen,” Marr said. “I don’t think anything has changed since the closure of the restaurants. If it’s anything, it’s more dangerous because of the new versions being more portable.”

Marr said the reduced capacity, improved ventilation and the addition of filtration will help reduce the risk, but none of it reduces it.

Marr points to a November study that showed it took only minutes before two meals became contaminated with Covid-19 from a meal sitting 15 feet away. The parties only overlapped at the restaurant for a few minutes, but due to the airflow they became ill.

Marr said if someone just can not help themselves and really wants to eat from home, you should like to eat outside if you are in a region where you will not get a side of freezing with your lobster tail.

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And outside, it really has to mean outside.

“Not a structure set up outside, because it becomes like indoors,” Marr said.

If you have to eat indoors, she said it would be okay if the restaurant was empty.

The public health experts suggest avoiding busy times in the restaurant. Read the restaurant’s safety guidelines online before leaving. Can you park yourself or do you have to valet? The CDC says that if you have to operate, keep the windows open and lower the car out of the air for 15 minutes before unloading it.

If there are crowds in the restaurant, look for a table that is about 10 feet apart. Masks are essential. The servers, the host and the meals should not be carried.

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Dr. Donald Milton adds that he would like to see people wear higher quality masks that fit well and can protect the wearer, as well as to protect others, especially with the more transferable variants.

“We need better masks, especially for those who will have people who do not wear a mask,” Milton, a professor of environmental health at the University of Maryland School of Public Health, studied how viruses are transmitted.

Diners can not only transmit the virus to each other while eating or talking to each other, but the tiny droplets can go up in the air and float around for a while, and depending on the restaurant’s ventilation, the droplets can spread further than 6 feet. .

Improved ventilation can help. Germicidal ultraviolet C lamps hung at ceiling level, such as those installed in some hospitals, can break down viruses as air circulates there.

“I think there are ways we can make restaurants and eateries a lot safer,” Milton said. “We need to learn what it is and do these things, but it’s going to take a little investment.”

Meanwhile, behavioral changes can help. Make sure only people from the same household sit at one table.

“Not sitting near another table might help, or sitting outside on a patio, but it all depends on how the air moves,” Milton said. “It’s really a lot about the plume. If you’re in the cloud and it’s the coronavirus, that’s bad news.”

For the time being, Milton said he was going to deliver for his Valentine’s dinner.

“It’s clear,” Milton said. “Any place where people take off masks and come together is dangerous for the spread of SARS-CoV-2. It has not changed.”

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