Restaurants And Covid – Coincidence Or Contribution?

The last thing I want to do is get in the way of the successful reopening of area restaurants. The choice to attend should be up to the hungry, right?  I have enjoyed a few local "outdoor dining" experiences during the pandemic but I haven't yet gone inside at "25% of capacity," but I will.

Still I think it's right to share a story from Fox News about a new report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that finds people diagnosed with COVID-19 are approximately “twice as likely” to have dined out at restaurants within the 14 days before they began to present symptoms.

The report, was  released Thursday (September 10th), noting that in-person dining at restaurants—“Masks cannot be effectively worn while eating and drinking,...where mask use and social distancing are difficult to maintain". Your mileage my differ, as they say.

However the study did have some limitations, not accounting for whether or not the participants dined indoors or outdoors and the authors also admitted that their sample group may not be representative of the entire country, and finally, participants who already knew of their Covid-19 diagnoses may have answered certain CDC survey questions differently than if they had not.