New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio could not have made it plainer last week when he said he has no immediate plans to permit the city’s restaurants from fully opening. But on Thursday he seemed to do a complete 180 when he announced that the decision on how soon restaurants are cleared to receive indoor diners is dependent on how the city’s schools perform when they reopen early next month.
“As more and more people come back to work, as schools begin,” he said, according to NYC Educator, “we’ll get to see a lot about what our long-term health picture looks like, and that’s going to help inform our decisions going forward.”
“There’s definitely openness on our part to going longer if we think it will contribute something,” he added, according to Eater NY.
Color me confused, but I’m not quite seeing a parallel between schools and restaurants. For one thing, the rate of infection among children is radically different from that of adults. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), while children comprise 22% of the U.S. population, only 7.3% of all cases of COVID-19 in the country have been reported among children.
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NYC Restaurateur: Restaurants Will Not ‘Survive the Year’ with Mayor Dismissing Indoor Dining
