How to stop restaurants from driving Covid infections
<i>&quot; But capping occupancy for all venues at 30% would reduce the number of additional infections to 1.1 million, the model estimated. If occupancy was capped at 20%, new infections would be reduced by more than 80% to about 650,000 cases.&quot;</i><p>Whilst such precautions are necessarily worthwhile and will save lives—and that by such action we&#x27;d also likely receive some respite from other communicable air-borne diseases (until now the best known being common influenza and tuberculosis)—this, unfortunately, seems to be only a partial remedy.  I don&#x27;t see how it could be sustained into the foreseeable future if restaurants are to continue to be viable, that is unless some paradigm shift occurs (such as everyone agreeing to pay higher prices), which seems unlikely.<p>Moreover, there is need for much more effective longer-term solutions not only for restaurants but also for many other indoor facilities, as we now know from old, recently re-verified, research that officially recommended social distancing separations of ≈1.5&#x2F;2M are inadequate†.  On the looks of it, this doesn&#x27;t bode well for restaurants and similar venues, at it would require a considerable makeover of physical layouts etc. including changing airflow directions, the introduction of specialist virus-nuking UV lamps&#x2F;lighting and such, which is expensive and thus would likely put many out of business.<p><i>†  Sans any rigorous scientific evidence, my own intuition&#x2F;rule of thumb for safe distancing is the maximum distance at which I can detect cigarette smoke for a given enclosed space and that&#x27;s at least three times officially recommended distances — my logic being that any smoke I can smell has already been in someone&#x27;s lungs, thus potentially liable to carry viruses.</i><p>Whilst clearly dealing with COVID-19 is the number one priority issue at present, we also need to address how to combat common communicable diseases that are spread by contact such as the notoriously contagious gastroenteritis viruses, rotavirus and norovirus.  These we also commonly catch by eating in restaurants (and traveling in cruise ships).<p>To me, eliminating these diseases from restaurants seems an easier problem to solve than it would be for their air-borne counterparts (or it ought to be), as they can essentially be eliminated by proper hygiene practice such as frequent and <i>effective</i> hand washing and by stopping other common bad practices such as the inappropriate handling of both food and surfaces that come in contact with food with dirty hands (touching food containers, plates, cutlery, etc.).<p>For instance, recently I was in a restaurant where the waitress held the cutlery by its food-contact surfaces (she placed forks on the table by their tines instead of by their handles and was oblivious to the fact).<p>Given our 21st Century understanding of hygiene, I don&#x27;t quite understand why everyone involved in food preparation doesn&#x27;t fully comprehend that such behaviour is wrong (especially so those in restaurants and in food industries).  Why, by now, are so many still ignorant of such healthy hygiene practices, practices that ought to be almost axiomatically ingrained in people&#x27;s psyche?<p><i>Note: here I&#x27;m (a) only referring to those in well educated nations; and (b) I&#x27;m specifically referring to communicable diseases.  I am not referring to the notion that modern, overly-clean environments that do not possess the wide range of bacteria commonly found in natural surroundings, can lead to autoimmune diseases such as asthma (in that children&#x27;s immune systems don&#x27;t develop property without them).  This is another issue altogether.</i><p>The COVID-19 pandemic has brought a number of public health matters of which we were already aware sharply back into focus, specifically the mechanisms by which we catch communicable diseases and the best methods to combat them.  It seems to me that whilst epidemiologists have mostly updated their understanding of the subject in line with current science, these facts haven&#x27;t flowed through to the public in sufficiently meaningful ways to be of benefit.  Put simply, if they had, then many fewer would have died from COVID-19.<p>Why the population hasn&#x27;t been sufficiently inculcated with a modern understanding of how communicable diseases spread and how to prevent them is open to debate but I&#x27;d reckon it&#x27;s origins are mainly historical.  With the advent of modern antibiotics, especially so since WWII, old worries about diseases such as cholera, tuberculosis and more latterly with polio since the &#x27;50s&#x2F;60s, have largely dissipated.  Unfortunately, in keeping with the increasingly common perception that these diseases are not as life-threatening as they once were and thus to be less feared, public health policy follow suited and paid less attention to promoting hygiene messages than it ought to have.<p>It&#x27;s why it&#x27;s now commonplace to see people, say, hanging onto steadying&#x2F;grab handles on public transport used by dozens before them, then who later are to be seen picking their noses or eating food directly from their hands without first thoroughly washing them — without them ever giving so much as a second thought about the fact that what they&#x27;ve done is wrong. It&#x27;s also likely why, early on in the COVID-19 pandemic, it was one of the most significant reasons why so many people never saw the need to wear masks (or why they were so easily talked out of doing so by health officials who (rightly) wanted to divert limited stocks to the medical profession)—despite the fact that masks were widely used during the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918-19.<p><i>[Collective intergenerational memory loss is not only significant here with COVID-19 but I&#x27;d maintain that it&#x27;s also problematic in many other areas of our existence.  It seems to me that we need to rethink and re-evaluate the idea held by every new generation, which is the notion that that the ideas of previous generations are old-hat and are to be mostly discarded.  This is not to say all old ideas are worth preserving—clearly not—rather it&#x27;s that we need a mechanism to keep relevant ones alive.  As we&#x27;ve seen with COVID-19, failure to do so has been very costly in terms of human life. Incidentally, it&#x27;s worth noting that in pre-industrial times, societies considered the ideas and wisdom of previous generations with much more respect than those of nowadays and accordingly they handed them down across many generations.]</i><p>Concomitant with this, since WWII, not only has there&#x27;s been both a huge increase in eating and dining out per capita, but also in people interconnecting with each other more generally—through modern transport, planes, international travel etc.  Thus, we&#x27;re now dearly paying the consequences of this diminished foresight.<p>It&#x27;s unclear to me how we can rectify this anytime soon, I recon it could take decades to fix unless there&#x27;s a concerted policy to do so quickly.  Especially so given increasing affluence and the shift of work away from manufacturing into service industries such as restaurants and coffee shops, all of which effectively bring people into contact with one another more than at any time since perhaps the beginning of the 20th Century.  Whilst it&#x27;s clear that modern living is nothing like the horrific conditions of the early industrial revolution, it could be that the coupling coefficients for viruses might be much closer that than we think.