NYC Restaurants Continue to Get Screwed

Maybe Mayor Bill de Blasio doesn't trust restaurateurs to make good decisions because he himself does not make them

Greetings fellow travelers, and yes, there’s snow on the ground this Thursday night in NYC; better, this afternoon there was verily a snow ballet outside my fourth floor window, the snow not so much falling as floating and dancing.

Know what it wasn’t doing? Blizzarding. Know what else didn’t happen? The city didn’t shut down. Oh, wait, a part of the city did: Its restaurants. This is on top of the reinstitution of the indoor dining ban I talked about in the last post. Yes, Mayor Bill de Blasio (who, if my father were alive, I can hear describing as someone who “cannot find his ass with both hands”) decided late Monday night that the outdoor dining structures restauranteurs built over the summer, in order to work around the previous no-indoor-dining rule, would now also be closed. Because of snow. Because god forbid someone make the personal choice to eat in the cold. Or, as my restaurant-owner friend texted at 12:02am on Tuesday, “Maybe it snows; maybe it doesn’t. But perhaps grown men who’ve figured out how to open a business are capable of determining whether or not we can feed people in our outdoor structure that cost us $10,000.”

To which Bill, with no skin in this game, essentially says, “Nope!” And the next day (because why?) posts a photo of himself riding the subway so, I guess, the little people will feel his solidarity, which they might, if they were on the subway riding to work, which many of them no longer are because the places they work are closed. I refuse to put BdB’s sour face here, but, if you must…

Here’s a better photo! Of the baked goods founding members of this site get for their money. Thank you! All being shipped tomorrow.

The restaurant closure issues, across the country, are maddening. I am sure most of you have seen the video from LA County earlier in the month. If anyone here can give me a rational explanation for why the restaurateur was closed but the movie crew’s dining tents were not, I will send you one of the baked goods above, l. to r., my best friend’s mother’s poundcake, brown butter and sage sables, and dark chocolate and cherry fruitcake bathed in rye, which I doused with some of the High West Whiskey Double Rye sent by a fan of the dudes on The Fifth Column, who are recording an episode in my living room as we speak.

Speaking of these dudes, and as mentioned last time, the studio across the hall from my apartment is being built! We have bought furniture! And are hoping to have it up and running by December 29. Will there be new podcasts and videos and articles and variety shows coming your way, from us, because why not? May-be!

Until then, am I a little exercised about the restaurant issue in New York City? Yes. We all are. Last week’s New York magazine ran the cover story, “So Long, Friends,” a paean to 500 places that have closed since the pandemic started. Eater NYC noted that 1000 places have permanently closed since March, and yesterday I learned that Chumley’s, the speakeasy in the West Village where my parents courted and said to be the origin of the phrase “86,” closed for good.

Look, I am not overly sentimental. Places close, the world continues to turn. And obviously, people smarter than I am about COVID-19 have good reasons why we need to do a better job about potentially spreading the virus. One of these people, Gregory H. Babunovic, a PhD Candidate in the Biological and Biomedical Sciences at Harvard University, did me a total solid after I published an article about COVID-19 transmission rates and restaurants closures earlier this week in Reason.com. The lede:

I was walking down Greenwich Avenue in New York City's West Village last week when I saw something poignant: dining tables at the curb, set with white linen and electric candles. It was only 5:30 p.m. but already dark, which might have added to the romance, and I guess it did, if you don't mind eating outside when it's 35 degrees out.

The restaurant was one of nine open along a two-block stretch of Greenwich between Sixth and Seventh Avenues, each trying to navigate Gov. Andrew Cuomo's edict,set in September, requiring New York City restaurants to operate at only 25 percent indoor capacity. Last week he took it even further: As of December 14 and until further notice, there will be no indoor dining permitted whatsoever. His reasoning? WithCOVID-19 hospitalization rates rising, any potential source of transmission must be eliminated.

This would appear not to be very educated guesswork. The latest transmission data show that 74 percent of new COVID-19 cases come from private in-home gatherings, and only 1.3 percent from bars and restaurants…

“This ‘1.3%’ number, as reported by NY State (and shown in Cuomo's press conference), is almost certainly uninterpretable,” wrote Babunovic, in a note to my editor, who passed it along to me, who immediately wrote to him to ask, help me please! And boy, did he, sending me so much rich information and signposts, as to how to read COVID-19 data, who’s not reading and/or transmitting it right (hi, New York State!), and why closing restaurants might be the way to go about things, if not in the ways they are being implemented. I include Babunovic’s full email (with his permission) below, with the idea that it will help you as much as it helped me.

Sunday #AMA update: Even before I learned that Periscope is going kaput in March, I’d decided to port over to Zoom for this Sunday’s Ask Me Anything. This way we can see one another and actually converse. Invite forthcoming to all subscribers.

Until then, quick shot from earlier tonight of people defying the outdoor dining ban.

With love and hot pie xx

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Hi Nancy - happy to provide what little help I can!

To preface all this: despite spending my days working at a school of public health, I'm not an epidemiologist or similar public-health-centric academic; my work is focused on the fundamental biology of a different (albeit aerosol-spread) disease, tuberculosis. So the info below is more from an epidemiology-adjacent scientist than someone deep in the thick of it.

That being said, I can offer some insight into why the NY State contact tracing data are almost certainly misleading. I can't offer similar insight into why NYS decided to plaster those data across TV screens and talk about it in press conferences (especially when, taken at face value, it makes the decision to close NYC indoor dining look... not good, as you point out).

Contact tracing, at least in the US, is primarily "forward" contact tracing: when someone tests positive, tracers will call them and ask for their contacts over the past several days. Tracers will then call those contacts and tell them to quarantine, to avoid spreading new infections. The focus of this tracing on future infections is why it's defined as the "forward" method. There are obvious advantages of a forward method: when applied rapidly enough, it can cut chains of transmission. Every city, state, or country doing contact tracing makes sure to do forward tracing as a baseline.

A difference between the US and other countries (e.g. South Korea) is that we tend not to focus as much on "backward" contact tracing. This type of tracing attempts to identify where people were infected; ideally, identifying "nodes" of infection (i.e. places and times where spread occurred) can help tracers find as-of-yet unidentified cases and get them tested and isolated (a good summary of this can be found here, in another epidemiology-adjacent academic's writing).

This doesn't mean US states don't backward-trace at all (it's just more of a halfhearted attempt). Tracers do try to identify where people were infected with SARS-CoV-2, generally by asking them where they've been and when they may have been exposed (I talked to a friend of mine who traces in Massachusetts, just to double-check on this). This is where bias creeps in: most people, when asked where they may have been exposed, have one of two answers:

1. "I don't know" - or, they don't give enough information to make an educated guess as to where they caught the virus. This makes up the majority of the NY State data, since of 210,000 cases only 46,000 provided enough information for tracers to make a good infection-source (backwards tracing) conclusion.

2. "My [spouse/son/parent/roommate/etc] had it, and they live with me". This is a dominant answer simply because people tend to know the infection status of their household better than any other group of people.

So, most backward-traced cases can be linked to household contacts. This doesn't mean that most cases overall are from household contacts: we can't ignore the 164,000 New Yorkers who did not provide enough information for backwards tracing. This 164,000 surely includes many people who went to bars, restaurants, gyms, or other locations where unrelated and maskless people gather in the same room; these people, however, could not narrow down their potential exposure to one place. In this case, the data we don't have is just as important as the data we do have. Given the inevitable bias towards household contacts when it comes to backwards-tracing, we can't make any firm conclusions about non-household sources of spread. In other words, the data NY State provided is enough to identify activities/places that definitely are sources of spread, but it is not enough to rule out any other source of spread.

So, what can we actually say about indoor dining as a source of transmission? There are a few lines of evidence that I can think of (in no particular order):

• The first is what we know about the mechanism of SARS-CoV-2 spread. It spreads primarily through an aerosol route of transmission, and therefore transmits most efficiently when people are in close quarters in small, relatively unventilated spaces, without respiratory barriers. This at least highlights the potential of restaurant transmission, as borne out by one of the first case studies on transmission dynamics, as well as more recent work (summarized here).

• Another is what we know from non-contact-tracing datasets. One of the best studies on this was published in Nature recently (and summarized in more human-understandable language in the NYT), which used cellphone data to model the effects of restaurant capacity restrictions - essentially saying that COVID case data best fits a model where restaurants, at full capacity, lead to superspreading events.

• Finally, there are other backward-tracing datasets. Looking at these, we need to keep in mind the caveat outlined above: that tracing can tell you when something is a source of spread, but cannot necessarily tell you when it is not a source. Therefore, we can see if other places doing backwards-tracing positively identify restaurants as a source of spread. As it happens, Washington DC does just that, with more methodological details than NY State (though, admittedly, this is a low bar: NY State has provided no methodological details that I could find). I tried to find some details on this from South Korea and Taiwan - where contact tracing datasets are as close to comprehensive as possible - but unfortunately came up empty-handed. Those data do exist somewhere, though (if maybe not publicly accessible nor explained in English).

Overall, the science we have right now suggests that indoor dining cannot be ruled out as a source of COVID transmission. I would argue that it is more likely than not a significant source of spread, though I can see reasonable people disagreeing with that. In any case, the NYS tracing data do not contribute much of anything to the conversation, though nobody seems to have informed Andrew Cuomo of that.am clso

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