I feel for them, but none of this is unsurprising.
Celebrating her birthday in Galveston, Melinda Prince walked out of Yaga’s Cafe on Thursday full of coconut shrimp. What she didn’t realize was one of the employees at the restaurant may have been working while infected with the coronavirus.
Prince found out three days later through a post from the restaurant’s Facebook account.
“I freaked out,” said Prince, who plans to quarantine for two weeks and get tested if COVID-19 symptoms arise.
Facebook posts from Yaga’s Cafe, whose managers did not respond to requests for comment, indicate other employees have since been tested for the coronavirus, the restaurant voluntarily closed, a professional cleaning crew was hired and recent customers were also encouraged to get tested.The Galveston eatery is not alone. Restaurants and bars across Texas — including in Austin, Dallas, Houston, San Antonio and San Marcos — have closed recently due to concerns about potentially spreading the coronavirus, according to social media posts and local news reports.
I wish there were a better answer. What should happen is another round of stimulus money from Congress – the original PPP idea was fine, if incredibly clunky at first – because we really can’t just reopen everything and hope for a return to normalcy. The virus is still out there, and we’re not doing nearly enough about it. At least we will have some new face mask orders, which should help a bit. Restaurants are a huge piece of our economy, with a ton of jobs at stake, and we’re not doing nearly enough to help them through this crisis. I don’t know what else to say.
Our Republican leadership is inept and corrupt. Meanwhile, Germany under the leadership of Angela Merkel seems to have handled the pandemic using reason and science and is reopening safely. https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2020/06/coronavirus-growth-in-western-countries-june-18-update/
What I don’t get about the ‘professional cleaning’ of buildings where a scarlet letter C person has been is, how long does the virus last on surfaces or in the air? 2 or 3 days max? No need to clean anything, just wait the two or three days, then reopen, when it’s no longer even a possibility that the virus is active in the building.
All this cleaning is really just useless virtue signalling. It’s Ralph Wiggum saying, “Look, I’m helping!”
Bill,
They found the active virus on the Diamond Princess surfaces some 17 days later…
Have you been out lately?
Strict proponents of supply and demand would say the economy would adjust with this pandemic. Restaurants’ place in it is where Pappas’ is, closing, which is allowed in the law of supply and demand. People who loose their job will go to where the economy is growing, which happens to be online in this day and age. One question that should be brought up is, how dependent should a city be on sales tax revenue? Sales tax revenue is not a promise and should be an extra revenue, not a necessary one. This pandemic is revealing the weakness in the tradeoff of tax breaks with a promise of sales tax revenue and the city ‘reopens’ because of a budget shortfall, leaving citizens at risk.
I wish we had the leader of the free world, Angela Merkel, as our president. We would be in a much better place here in America, Instead of having the Keystone cops Trump administration bumbling along with their lackeys in republican states.
So, The red states are doing better than blue states