A Sneeze - © James Gathany for the CDC

COVID-19 Etiquette: Is Dining Out Now Taboo?

Doctors and other civic officials in my town are doubling down on earlier recommendations to avoid close contact with others to lower your risk of catching COVID-19. Social distancing’ is the new catch phrase on everybody’s tongues, and the new official guidance is, ‘Stay home!’

Empty Restaurant - © earlytorise.comAn empty restaurant in the heart of the entertainment district:
Becoming a common sight thanks to COVID-19.

The front page of my newspaper this morning shouted at me, ‘STAY HOME’ in huge, heavy black letters. That was a quote from the city’s Medical Officer of Health, Dr. Vera Etches, who held an emergency news conference on the COVID-19 situation yesterday afternoon.

“What I can tell people in Ottawa is that they should not go out for non-essential reasons — and one can assume it’s non-essential to go to a bar,” she added pointedly.

Another story, on an inside page, quoted bar and restaurant operators as lamenting that tomorrow’s St. Patrick’s Day festivities will be muted, to say the least. They say their establishments are all but deserted, as it is. Starbuck’s, the premium Coffee giant, announced in another story that it will be closing some of its locations for the duration of the pandemic, and reducing open hours for others.

Yet another story, from the Financial Post (FP), chronicled the journey of a reporter in Toronto, Calum Marsh, who dared to ‘go out’ in the Canadian city hit hardest by the corona virus to see first hand what people were doing – and not doing – during the crisis. And here’s where we get down to the business hinted at in our headline today.

“On Saturday night I went to a bar and a restaurant and a local comedy show and felt distinctly weird about it. Everyone else […] seemed to feel weird about it, too – as if we had collectively made a grievous social gaffe, blundered into some serious faux pas,” Marsh wrote. His message? ‘Going to restaurants at a time like this can look like arrogance’.

Other commentators have noted that young people – who often think of themselves as ‘bullet proof’ anyway – now feel they they are very unlikely to catch COVID-19. The problem with that is, they can still get it and suffer few or no serious symptoms, but not knowing they have it they can spread it far and wide simply by going about their everyday business as if nothing was wrong in the world. Alas, one errant sneeze (see photo, top of page) is all it takes to catch or transmit COVID-19.

“There is a threshold,” Marsh states, “over which confidence starts to look like arrogance, beyond which a blithe and cavalier attitude begins to look foolish and reckless.”

My take

I agree wholeheartedly with Marsh. There are far too many folks out there – not all young people, either – who are treating the COVID-19 pandemic as a mere inconvenience, a trivial annoyance. As Marsh notes, near the end of his column, “…denial […] may be even more dangerous than panic.”

~ Maggie J.