Indoor dining isn’t totally safe even for vaccinated people, experts say
Just because indoor dining is out there now within the Bay Area, you should not necessarily roll in the hay yet — albeit you’re vaccinated, consistent with communicable disease experts.
Since the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines are 95% effective, experts agree it’s unlikely a totally vaccinated person will get sick from indoor dining, but they caution it's going to not be well worth the risk immediately.
While one said the practice should be fine for younger vaccinated people, he warned that an older individual with pre-existing health conditions should be more careful. Another expert said indoor dining is currently unwise for anyone because there are still such a lot of viruses within the community — and more contagious variants are spreading. However, things could improve during a few weeks.
Without any official guidance from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, it becomes a private decision.
“It depends on who you're and what your risk tolerance is,” said George Rutherford, a UCSF communicable disease expert.
The CDC released new guidelines Monday stating that vaccinated people can safely gather with other vaccinated people indoors without a mask, although the agency didn’t address restaurants. There, the challenge is that it’s impossible to understand whether workers or fellow diners are fully vaccinated also. It’s still unknown whether a vaccinated person can carry the virus, potentially infecting people despite not feeling sick.
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“Until we have a solution thereto question with far more data, I feel it’s prudent to assume it’s possible,” said John Swartzberg, an communicable disease expert at UC Berkeley. A more transmissible strain is projected to become dominant by the top of March, which could lead to “a super spreading event” if many of us during a restaurant aren’t vaccinated, he added.
For Rutherford, whether to dine inside depends on personal risk factors, like age and pre-existing health conditions. That’s because the probabilities of getting sick when fully vaccinated are slim, but they’re not nonexistent.
Restaurant density matters tons, too, he said. While San Francisco restaurants are required to work at 25% capacity with tables spaced a minimum of 6 feet apart, there isn’t much enforcement of the principles unless diners report businesses to the health department. If two tables are right next to every other, that would put even a totally vaccinated person in danger, he said.
Since indoor dining isn’t an important activity, Stanford University communicable disease expert Robert Siegel recommends continuing with outdoor dining and takeout — or waiting until more of the population is additionally vaccinated.
“We’ve gotten to the purpose where we expect red tier means safe. But check out the definition,” he said. (Red tier means the virus spread is “substantial.”) “If you would like to be completely safe, you shouldn’t take your mask off.”
The coronavirus case counts are too high in California for Swartzberg to feel good about dining at a restaurant — the numbers are almost like last summer’s surge, a time when few considered indoor dining safe. While Swartzberg, who is fully vaccinated and in his 70s, feels confident he won’t die from the coronavirus, he knows there’s a little chance he could get sick — and he’d rather not risk enduring a flulike case for a dining experience.
From a public health outlook, he’s also concerned about multiple more-contagious variants that have already been detected within the state. He pointed to the CDC’s recent study linking restaurant dining to surges in coronavirus cases, and he fears that there could be a fourth surgeon its way. Ideally, people should hold off on indoor dining for an additional four to 6 weeks, he said.
“It’s like there’s a storm off the coast of California, and that we don’t know if it’s getting to come to land or not,” he said. “We keep playing this same record over and over again: We undergo a surge, we become really careful with social distancing and masking, and low and behold the numbers drop. But whenever after a surge, we relax timely .”
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