This week, WCBE Podcast Prognosis Ohio debuted a new segment called A Few Minutes Moore, where Scioto Analysis Principal Rob Moore provides commentary on interviews for the show. The full transcript of the first segment, responding to an interview with John Barker of the Ohio Restaurant Association on reopening restaurants, is available below.
Over the past two months, we have been firsthand witnesses to one of the most unique economic events in Ohio’s history: the intentional closing of large sectors of the economy to curb the spread of a deadly virus.
On the latest episode of Prognosis Ohio, Dan talked to John Barker, the President of the Ohio Restaurant Association, the trade association for the industry most widely and deeply impacted by social distancing measures.
Restaurants have been caught in the crosshairs of the COVID crisis. Last week, MIT researchers published a study on the transmission risk and social benefits of types of locations impacted by social distancing measures to stop the transmission of COVID-19. In this study, they married smartphone visitation data assessing the volume and density of location crowding with employment and sales data and a survey they conducted on public opinion of location importance to assess transmission risk along with social importance of types of locations.
On the one hand, sit down and fast food restaurants were the first- and second- highest locations for risk of transmission of the twenty-six types of locations in the study. These locations are densely packed with many unique visitors moving in and out and staying for a relatively long period of time. Popular restaurants are pretty much the closest thing we get to a continually-operating mass gathering.
On the other hand, sit down and fast food restaurants are centers of commerce and employment and heavily valued by the public. The study found fast food restaurants to be among the top five most socially important types of locations along with banks, groceries, general merchandise stores, and auto and mechanic stores. Sit down restaurants were not far behind in the top ten.
Thus the restaurant dilemma. We care about and value restaurants, but they are the most dangerous places we have when trying to stop the spread of an airborne illness.
As we reopen Ohio, the governor has treated the restaurant issue gingerly. As Dan brought up, we currently have no timeline for the opening of restaurants and bars in the state, though some conversation has transpired around appropriate standards for cleanliness, personal protection equipment, and social distancing measures on premise.
The problem with a lot of these proposals is that, as Barker said in his interview, restaurants run on exceedingly thin margins. I was talking to a restaurant owner in my neighborhood, the Brewery District, last week, who told me that opening at half capacity with scarce, expensive personal protection equipment is not viable for his business, and that they will wait until they can open to full capacity to resume dine-in business, citing the coalition of 50 Georgia restaurant chains that organized recently to make a similar announcement. And as Barker said in the interview, even all these measures in place will not necessarily make people feel safe enough to go back to restaurants on their own.
In an ideal world, we have perfect information about who has been infected and we ask those individuals to self-quarantine with violation of that request subject to penalties in proportion to the risk they expose others to. In absence of a robust testing infrastructure, we have to rely on blunt-force interventions such as closing entire sectors of the economy.
How we decide to navigate into a new normal will have significant impact on the lives and livelihoods at risk and reliant on this and other industries. I think I am not alone in hoping that the easing of social distancing restrictions matches the compassion and prudence that led to their implementation in the first place.