Yes, restaurants are facing the ultimate existential plight: “Give me liberty, or give me death”. There’s no real middle ground. One-third occupancy max? Who can make the rent and payroll that way over time? And lines of people six feet apart outside who impatiently won’t wait to be seated – especially in bad weather?
The restaurant system will have to rely much more heavily on reservations with allocated times for each table to better be able to plan. Some countries in Europe discussing something similar even for beach places (which makes a lot of sense since social distancing (with a number of other things) will be critical) to keep the number of infections down. Unfortunately the US doesn’t prepare enough currently for many of the tools and as a consequence it will be either a disaster because we will have to shut down economy/society on a regular basis to not overwhelm the hospital system or we are ignoring the increasing number of deaths in the next 12-18 months and will have >1-2 million deaths until there will be a vaccine available => hopefully people will now understand how important are elections and capable governments to avoid unnecessary suffering and death.
They won’t need to worry about reservations until people feel safe going out to eat. In the SF Bay Area business was off maybe 80% before the March 16 lockdown orders.
I remember you or Honkman having made that point earlier. People were using common sense and their own level of concern in terms of choosing whether or not to go to sit-down restaurants, before March 16. If common sense, courtesy, and decency were to continue to prevail, perhaps allowing at least some kinds of restaurants to re-open without capacity constraints wouldn’t exacerbate the transmission problem. Maybe it would self-limit, in other words. Of course, you can’t eat and wear a mask, but spacing patrons might be adequate for safety (and I think people wouldn’t have to be told to do that, with sufficient publicity of guidelines).
A very interesting article. It’s easy to see how the people at table B could have been infected by A1, but harder to understand those at table C, which would seem to require the droplets to have remained airborne as they recirculated all the way from table A back to the a/c location (return).
In any case, I think that ventilation engineers have some homework to do and this information Is helpful!
I wonder if a diffuser of some sort over horizontal a/c outlets in restaurants (and elsewhere) would reduce the chance of transporting droplets between tables? Also, vertical overhead outlets would seem to blow the droplets to the floor.
And it won’t be only about ventilation in restaurants- similar issues with ventilation in every office building on a much larger scale
The recirculating air clearly carried virus particles, as was even more clearly the case in the Hunan bus cluster study. So far there have been few reports of clusters in offices, so go figure.
Almost all of the bigger restaurants, and some smaller, have overhead HVAC outlets. The air is diffused and directed downward. I don’t think there’s a lot of horizontal airflow at face level, at least not in the more modern small restaurants and "upscale: places. In some tiny spots, the ones I’ll miss greatly, things are different.
What matters is the pattern of how the air is recirculated around the room, that is, how the air flows from the supply vents to the return vents.
Well, yes.
Though provoking piece. Interesting argument for letting it die.
I suspect we’ll see some pretty interesting reinvention of all the models for serving food as Covid progresses.
That makes me think of Gabrielle Hamilton’s piece in the NY TImes.
In 1999, when I opened Prune, I still woke each morning to roosters crowing from the rooftop of the tenement building down the block, which is now a steel-and-glass tower. A less-than-500-square-foot studio apartment rents for $3,810 a month.
The girl who called about brunch the first day we were closed probably lives there. She is used to having an Uber driver pick her up exactly where she stands at any hour of the day, a gel mani-pedi every two weeks and award-winning Thai food delivered to her door by a guy who braved the sleet, having attached oven mitts to his bicycle handlebars to keep his hands warm. But I know she would be outraged if charged $28 for a Bloody Mary.
Gabrielle Hamilton’s piece in the NYT was very good and, I think, laid out the challenges very well. Has anyone linked that article here?
I’m not sure about this topic but from a few others so far.
LA Times piece on undocumented individuals who have kept our restaurants going:
Direct link to the LA-based non-profit working to feed and support these families:
Cross-posted here:
How do you think this will impact hotels and air conditioning in the rooms? My wife is concerned about whether or not the ventilation and AC is shared between rooms. If somebody infected is in the room next to us could they be spreading the virus through the AC or ventilation?