Kansas City area restaurants open up, but are they safe? Here’s what you need to know
Kansas City’s health director, Rex Archer, had a hand in drafting a long list of rules for restaurants reopening their dining rooms Friday after weeks of takeout-only service. Still, he said, up to half of residents should stay away.
“I’m not going to be going out and dining until we get much further along with either a vaccine or effective treatment for this disease because it’s just not worth the risk,” Archer told The Star Wednesday.
People who are over 65 or have underlying health conditions that put them at greater risk for dying from COVID-19 “absolutely shouldn’t go out,” he said. But even with precautions, restaurants are risky for customers of any age, health officials say.
Last week, parts of the Northland began allowing dine-in service, with restrictions. On Monday, Johnson County and eastern Jackson County did the same. On Friday, Kansas City restaurants can join them — so long as they keep tables spaced 10 feet apart.
But coronavirus hasn’t left. As restaurants throw open their dining spaces and invite customers back in, health experts urge caution.
“From loosening these restrictions, there’s no question that we will have more cases,” Archer said.
Health experts say customers can take some precautions, such as wearing masks until they’re seated and asking for tables outside. And Kansas City will look at ways to give restaurants more space for outdoor seating.
But Archer said Kansas City health officials “don’t completely know” how effective their regulations will be.
For example, a restaurant may be told to check employees for symptoms, but coronavirus is often spread by people with no symptoms.
“This virus hasn’t been around long enough to have 100% confidence and proof of — where is that sweet spot?” Archer said. “If you put the tables 50 feet apart in separate rooms with different ventilation systems, then your risk is very low, but a restaurant can’t operate that way.”
Rules and risks
Regulations for restaurants vary across the metro. Johnson County requires restaurant tables to be kept six feet apart and parties limited to 10.
In Kansas City, tables must be at least 10 feet apart. There must be six feet between the back of one diner’s chair and the back of the chair of a diner in the next party over. Servers have to wear masks. Bar and buffet service are both prohibited. And workers and patrons with symptoms must be turned away.
The Missouri Restaurant Association recommends that all staff members “undergo a visible screening and verbal health survey before each shift.”
The recommendation is just one of several the trade group posted on its website, along with a statement reassuring customers that “restaurants have always kept food safety and the health of our customers and staff members our top priority.”
The group has also recommended that restaurants provide disposable or cleanable laminated menus, make hand sanitizer or sanitizer products available to guests and staff, clean and disinfect tables and chairs after every use.
But all those measures don’t eliminate the chance of you getting infected by your server or other customers, public health experts say.
There are inherent risks in people gathering for prolonged periods, they say.
“If there’s evidence of a lot of transmission of virus in the community, it’s really difficult to say that it’s safe to bring people together and have them seated in a common dining facility and not have them at risk for some transmission of coronavirus,” said Craig Hedberg, an expert on foodborne illness and infectious disease outbreaks with the School of Public Health at the University of Minnesota.
“That’s why, right now, there are certain inherent risks we can’t fully eliminate in restaurant operations. And it’s why even if everybody says, ‘we’ve got things sufficiently under control, that the risk is low,’ we can never really get to a point, right now, where we say that the risk is not there.”
As stay-at-home orders relax around the metro and local governments offer safety guidance to restaurants, some owners have decided to wait a bit longer before they reopen their dining rooms.
For now, to-go ordering is the safest option, said Dr. Dana Hawkinson, medical director of infection prevention and control at The University of Kansas Health System.
“If you can still get takeout, please get takeout,” Hawkinson said Wednesday.
But Bill Teel, executive director of the Greater Kansas City Restaurant Association, maintains that eateries are safe. He pushed Mayor Quinton Lucas to abandon caps on the number of people a restaurant could serve at one time and instead adopt rules for spacing out tables.
“We want to get Kansas City open and move to the future,” Teel said. “We’re all about safety. We clean, sanitize; we sterilize. We are safer than retail places now where people can pick up items and put them back down and walk off.”
Whether it’s safe to dine in a restaurant right now is one of those questions that’s hard for a scientist to answer definitively, said Don Schaffner, a professor of food microbiology at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.
“The short answer is no,” said Schaffner. “But the longer answer is, it was never safe. Anytime you go out to a restaurant you run the risk of getting food poisoning. Of course you also run the risk of getting food poisoning if you don’t cook the food properly in your own home.
“We can’t live in a risk-free world. But what we can do is try to minimize that risk as much as possible. And then of course, everybody’s risk calculation is different. And so, the risk calculation that my 30-year-old son might do is different than the risk calculation that my 80-plus-year-old parents might do.
“For example, I’ve told my parents that they really should not go to the grocery store, that they should have another family member from whom they keep socially distant do the grocery shopping for them.
“And I would give them the same advice about eating out in restaurants because they are in an at-risk group. I think it’s a really bad idea for them to go out to a restaurant.”
What makes it risky
Two things concern Hedberg about dining out right now. The first is what scientists now know about how people can transmit this new coronavirus before they show symptoms.
“So early on, when this thing was first developing and people were starting to sort of scale back their public engagements, the role of asymptomatic people in spreading the virus wasn’t really clear, and now it is,” he said. “So we can’t use screening for symptoms as a way of ensuring that there are no infected food workers present or no infected patrons.”
He is also concerned about evidence showing that keeping groups six feet apart from other groups might not stop transmission “delivered by droplets, these relatively large particles that we’re expelling when we speak, or laugh, or cough, or talk,” he said.
“And it’s clear that not all transmission requires prolonged, close encounters with other people in that little six-foot sphere around you, that there’s some more longer-range airborne spread of this virus going on.
“So in a setting where you have people in a dining room, sitting in a common air space, for a prolonged period of time, even if they’re more than six feet apart, you can’t really be sure they’re going to be separated from transmission of the virus.”
Public health experts cite a study conducted in China during that country’s outbreak that showed how one asymptomatic diner infected others in a restaurant with an assist from the air conditioning system. People seated more than six feet away at other tables, downwind of the diner and the air conditioning vent, became infected, as did people sitting at his table.
But people sitting at tables outside that stream of air flow were not exposed.
“So in indoor settings, there’s potential risk of transmission, depending on what the movement of air and the circulation of air in that room might be,” said Hedberg.
“The problem from the standpoint of being a consumer is that if you’re going into a dining room, for instance, a lot of that may not be something that you would be able to readily discern.”
Staying safe
Hedberg said that as transmission of the virus in different communities slows down, safety precautions recommended for restaurants “are very reasonable.”
There are signs customers can look for to tell how seriously a restaurant is taking COVID-era safety.
“If you walk into a restaurant … and there’s a lot of people milling around together, then that’s not a good thing,” said Hedberg. “If there’s a bar area where people are crowded together, that’s not a good thing.
“If the wait staff and customers are sort of randomly mixing in close proximity to each other and nobody is wearing masks, that’s not a good thing.”
Hedberg and KU’s Hawkinson say eating outdoors is safer. Tables should be separated by a minimum of six feet, if not as much as eight to 10 feet, Hawkinson said.
“So now we’re getting into a period of time, in Kansas City and even up here in Minnesota, it’s getting to be nice enough that people can eat out of doors,” said Hedberg. “So if a restaurant has outdoor seating, a patio area, that is less risky than being in enclosed air space like a dining room.”
Lucas and several City Council members are expected to introduce legislation on Thursday to allow for street closures in entertainment districts so restaurants have room for more outdoor seating, cafe style.
Kansas City requires employees to wear masks in public areas and encourages customers to do the same until they are seated.
“Everybody inside that restaurant should have a mask on,” said Steve Stites, chief medical officer for The University of Kansas Health System.
“I saw that they’re saying servers should have masks on, but I don’t know why cooks don’t have masks on — because they’re breathing over and cooking the food, so I’d say cooks and servers. You ought to be at least more than six feet apart.”
Hedberg, though, questions the effectiveness of masks.
“One of the recommendations from the CDC is the restaurant staff mask themselves,” said Hedberg. “Masking may reduce some large particle transmission. The science behind masking as a way of really preventing respiratory transmission is not terribly strong.
“It may reduce some direct exposure when two people are talking face to face if they’re both wearing masks. It may limit the big particles that sort of move between them. But it’s not an absolute barrier.”
Schaffner said that whether a particular restaurant is safe depends partly on how it manages the risk of illness among its employees. “If you’re in a restaurant, there’s a couple of different ways that you could contract the disease. One would be from a server, one would be from another customer in the restaurant,” he said.
“I think if somebody in the back of the house is sick with COVID-19, the likelihood that you would get sick from the food prepared by that back of the house person is unlikely. It’s much more likely that that back-of-the-house employee would give it to a server who would then give it to you.”
How well restaurants follow safety recommendations remains to be seen, and some reportedly are ignoring them already, according to one Facebook account that said patrons at one Johnson County restaurant huddled shoulder-to-shoulder at the bar this week.
Hedberg said this is a new way of doing business for restaurants that have never had to deal with the behavior of their patrons to this extent.
“Restaurants are very focused on what their employees are doing, they’re very focused on their main mission of producing food safely,” said Hedberg.
“But they’ve never really been focused on what’s happening out on the dining room floor, in terms of, ‘is somebody walking into my establishment who may be shedding a respiratory virus.’
“There’s a lot of people who are just tired of sort of living under these distancing rules and want things to be back to normal. The problem is if people just start behaving as if this were all over, it blows up all in our face.”
This story was originally published May 14, 2020 at 5:00 AM.