As coronavirus cases ebb, city matches state rules on allowing later nights for businesses, residents
A server delivers food to enclosed outdoor dining spaces at Charlie’s Kitchen in Harvard Square in November. (Photo: Marc Levy)
Cambridge has often adopted tougher Covid-19 precautions than the state, but on Monday the city will go along with Gov. Charlie Baker’s decision to end the 9:30 p.m. closing time for restaurants, retailers and most other businesses and lift an advisory asking residents to stay at home between 10 p.m. and 5 a.m. The governor said the 25 percent capacity limit for most businesses and limits on gatherings will remain in place for another two weeks.
The decision was announced Friday by city spokesman Lee Gianetti. Cambridge-only restrictions forbidding museums, indoor movie theaters and other indoor performance and gathering spaces to operate will stay in place until at least Feb. 1. Special capacity and time limits for gyms and health clubs, as well as other restrictions that are part of the city’s modified Phase 2, Step 2, reopening plan, will also remain in effect until at least Feb. 1 for now, Gianetti said.
Baker said he was ending the stay-at-home advisory and early closing order because the number of new Covid-19 cases and hospitalizations is dropping. In Cambridge, average new cases have declined slightly since a peak Jan. 8 that exceeded the highest new-infection level during the spring surge. The number of deaths has also been rising since mid-December after not changing for months.
City Manager Louis A. DePasquale has resisted pressure from some city councillors and recommendations from the city’s Expert Advisory Panel to close indoor dining at restaurants, saying the city does not have the resources to save battered restaurants and questioning whether there is evidence that indoor dining results in more infections. DePasquale also rejected arguments that keeping restaurants open came at the expense of keeping schools open to in-person learning.
That argument seemed strong when schools closed to most students in mid-December after cases began surging and exceeded set points for closing adopted last fall that reflected the number of new infections in the city and the region. The situation changed when the School Committee adopted new standards Jan. 5 that depend on transmission in individual schools, and schools reopened in-person learning for younger students and those with special needs on Feb. 11. School officials are now looking to expand in-person classes to all grades starting March 1.
Ebbed? Are they looking at the same Dashboard that we see from the state as it is updated?
I have gotten the feeling that the Governor’s Office is focusing too much on the number of Hospitalized cases and seems to be ignoring the actual number of infections over time.
The Statewide Boards have shown not an ebb but a plateau in the second wave… and that seems in part to be because of a delay in the reporting of information from day to day. Every time we hit a Holiday or a change in policy the numbers fluctuate, a dip from a reduction in testing reports (or an outright lack of a report) and then a surge upwards as the delayed lab work comes in, and then a surge as people who failed to follow the rules somewhere or who failed to follow the self quarantine rules after travel out of state, another scale up as they infect family, friends or co-workers and then a return to the same plateau.
There is also no tracking in the State public board of the “long covid” effects where people who are no longer testing positive have lingering or permanent damage. Or the fact that there has been an analysis in other states and countries where 1 in 8 people that have ended up hospitalized from the virus have ended up, after being released, re-hospitalized from the damage within 120 days, often with blood clot related problems after being taken off the blood thinners that are prescribed (and that a significant number of them die from heart damage the disease has caused).
The City Manager and the Governor have both been to reluctant to take enough steps throughout this pandemic. They have over focused on the incoming funds from the tax base of businesses rather than the human costs to the long term health situation.
Ignoring the studies that have been done regarding indoor dining and claiming there “has been no proof” when there has been studies done in the EU, UK, Japan etc. that show the extreme risk of indoor dining is just one more sign of their focus being on the money rather than the science.