D.C. Mayor Issues “Scientific” Guidance On Winter Dining

D.C. Mayor Issues “Scientific” Guidance On Winter Dining

D.C. Mayor Issues “Scientific” Guidance On Winter Dining

Some exceptionally scientific guidance has been issued by Washington D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser. Winter is approaching and restaurants are understandably trying to figure out how they’ll stay open. 

“Restaurants in the District are already bracing for the return of colder weather, which will make outdoor dining — a real lifeline during pandemic-related restrictions that have hampered business — less appetizing. Earlier this week, D.C. nightlife titans Eric and Ian Hilton said they would close seven of their bar-centric concepts in the District on Oct. 31 and keep them closed “for the foreseeable future” after “constantly restructuring our operations to comply with the mayor’s orders.”

“To our fellow friends and colleagues who are fighting this fight: We encourage you to take a realistic look at the current and foreseeable future and determine how sustainable this fight is without meaningful support,” Ian Hilton wrote in a statement.”

Evidently Mayor Bowser received a visit from a very scientific Good Idea Fairy. She now has a PLAN!

That’s her plan? Tents? With heaters of some kind? The science here is AMAZING! DC restaurants have been restricted to 50% capacity. And instead of ramping up to 75% capacity as Maryland did in the last few days, Bowser comes up with tents as the solution. TENTS. 

Let’s look at the science shall we? In the winter, one isn’t going to want to sit in a tent with the sides tied up to let cold fresh air through. Nope, people will want the sides down, the tent door closed, and heaters going. 

Oh wait… doesn’t that sound like INDOOR DINING??! 

Why yes, yes it does. But I guess being in a tent and eating food isn’t as dangerous as being inside a building and eating food. It’s all so very scientific or something. 

And how about those heaters? What kind of heaters will work best? Are we talking multiple stand up gas heaters? The overhead propane heaters? The choices are endless. Except for the fact that they will be futile during blizzards or major cold snaps.

A few years ago my husband and I were in the DC area for meetings. Remember the Polar Vortex in mid-November 2014? Now we are used to cold weather given we grew up in WY and are living in the Rocky Mountain Region. However, we hadn’t planned for daytime temps below zero, so had to do a quick bit of shopping for glove liners, extra socks, and long underwear. 

Our meetings were in a building next to a shooting range. The building had open vents at the top and no heating. Space heaters were brought in. Let me tell you what. Those space heaters worked hard, and each one managed to heat about a three foot diameter space directly in front of the heater. We all took turns walking over from our exhibit booths to stand directly in front of the heaters in an attempt to warm up. Everyone who was there was a popsicle by the end of the day, and we were all standing and constantly moving around!

Sooo, back to Bowser’s scientific tent idea. How will this work? Make a reservation for your favorite place knowing you’ll be outside IN A TENT. Check the weather and realize that you’ll need to bundle up in about 30 layers. Take extra hand and foot warmers and hope you’ll get seated directly next to or under a heater. 

On to the dining experience! You order wine, hope it doesn’t arrive at the table resembling slush. You order a hot appetizer. Will it make it to the table before freezing? How about your entrees? How fast will you have to eat before your food turns cold? In fact, will you be able to eat, drink, and converse with your friends while your teeth are chattering 900 miles an hour?

By the time you finish your meal, you are so cold that the only dessert you want is either a hot chocolate loaded with a serious amount of peppermint schnapps, or a whiskey-laden cup of coffee.

Yes indeed. In the realm of scientifically stupid ideas that have popped up during this entire Covid flu mess, this one takes the cake. 

There could be an upside to this. If the tents are enclosed then D.C. diners won’t have to worry about crap like this.

Oh wait. Never mind. They’ll just come inside the tent and scream at you. 

The science is clear. Politics is stupid and the virus has zapped what remaining brain cells our politicians had right out of existence. 

Let the restaurants open up and just freaking stop with all this nonsense. Please and thank you. 

Welcome Instapundit Readers!

Feature Photo Credit: Restaurant photo by Tama66 via Pixabay, cropped and modified

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4 Comments
  • Robin H says:

    This is all completely arbitrary at this point. The first time I got to dine indoors I had to wear my mask to walk the 10 feet to our table. Once there I was allowed to take it off. Do the cooties (I like to call them that, it brings back memories of us telling each other to “stop touching me, I’ll get cooties”) only hover at 5 feet and above? Sitting at the table seems to be better than standing at the bar so it must have something to do with how high it is.

    If there was any science behind any of this then wouldn’t all the rules be the same?

    I went to Target today. I grabbed a cart from outside. Inside was a man offering to wipe the handles off for me. He was a little surprised when I refused. For God’s sake, I already had my hands all over the cart handle, what good would wiping if off after that do?? I see the same thing at my grocery store, the wipes are inside, after you get the cart. Yet so many still stop to wipe it down. It’s simply stunning how stupid people are,

  • John says:

    Covid is so yesterday! Let’s get on to the next attack President Trump meme.

  • Andrew says:

    D.C. local government is well-known as a center of excellence for governmental mendacity and stupidity. None of this is surprising. Bowser, however, is particularly incompetent and power-hungry, even by local standards. The people who live there, and pay taxes to perpetuate this hot mess, get what they deserve.

  • Quentin-Q Quill says:

    “Covid is so yesterday?” Well, I have two relatives who are currently ill and waiting for the results of their covid tests. They live in an area that previously had low covid numbers but the numbers have recently been increasing fairly rapidly in their area. They’re expecting their tests to be postive because one of them has coworkers who’ve been sick with covid. They’re likely to recover okay because they don’t have any risk factors and they are in their fifties. In the small town where they live one person has already died of covid. I have another relative who has three firends who’ve had covid within the last couple months. This is in an area that previusly had a low number of cases but has seen an increase during the last few months. One of her friends died. Another was quite ill in the hospital. He’s now home but has to use oxygen and they don’t know if he’ll ever be the same as he was before getting covid. The third person was sick for around three weeks, was then recovering well, but then had a relapse. I haven’t heard how she has been doing lately.

    A woman who works at a Mexican restaurant where I get takeout said she had a relative who died of covid. Her relative’s wife was quite ill and they didn’t know if she was going to survive. I’ve known of other people who had mild cases of covid and recovered without problems.

    If you look at a graph of covid deaths in the U,S., you’ll see that the number of deaths has been about the same for the last eight weeks. It looks like there could be a trend of a slight to moderate decrease last week and maybe again this week, but the trend may increase when colder weather arrives. Annual flu related deaths are estimated to vary between 12,000 and 61,000 in the U.S. Covid deaths for the U.S. are now reported as being around 200,000 and we have several months left in 2020. It also appears that covid season is throughout the year, unlike the flu season which is usually just part or parts of the year. So when people said that “covid is just like the flu,” they were wrong.

    I have a friend from Brazil whose sister works in a hospital in Brazil. His sister says the government is definitely hiding the number of covid deaths in Brazil. She said they’ve changed the way deaths are recorded in hospitals to hide covid deaths so the deaths from covid in Brazil are probably much higher than reported. I have another friend who lives in Costa Rica. Costa Rica had been successful in controlling covid but then cases came in from neighboring Nicargaua and now their cases are much higher. A woman who helped out my friend’s father a couple days a week came down with covid. My friend was afraid his elderly father would also get covid. Thakfully, so far his father has been fine and his helper has recovered. One reason covid cases increased in Costa Rica is that Costa Rica has a much better health care system than Nicaragua so people from Nicaragua crossed the border into Costa Rica to receive health care in Costa Rica.

    A number of months ago the science writer Laurie Garrett, who has covered many epidemics, said she thought that there really wouldn’t be a “second wave” of covid-19 because the first wave would never really go away. She said cases would decline and increase in different parts of the world at different times. Her most optimistic estimate for getting covid under control worldwide was three years because of the time needed to develop a vaccine, and then once a vaccine was developed the logistics of getting most people in the world vaccinated. So far her outlook seems to have been correct. Cases have risen and fallen in different parts of the U.S. at different times as well as in the rest of the world. The United Kingdom, for example, is currently experiencing an increase of cases after having cases fall. The area in the U.S. where my realtives live previously had low rates of cases and deaths but they now have a fairly fast rate of increasing cases and deaths long after the number of cases and deaths declined greatly in the hard hit East Coast States.

    The good news is that treatment has improved for more serious cases of covid-19, but no, covid-19 is not “so yesterday”, particularly if it increases again as we enter the colder months of the year in the northern hemisphere.

    Laurie Garrett wrote the book The Coming Plague Newly Emerging Diseases In A World Out Of Order in 1994. In this book Garrett warned that because of social and environmental changes the world would likely see new diseases emerging in humans and that world health systems weren’t ready to deal with this. Garrett won a Pulitzer prize for explanatory journalism for her work on Ebola in Zaire and has also won Polk prizes for her science writing. Prior to entering science writing, Garret was working on a PhD in science. Garrett has been called a “Cassandra” because of her foresight about emerging diseases. I’ve noticed that when Garrett is wrong about something, she issues a correction.

    Compare Garrett and other people like her, who have deep backgrounds of knowledge abotu diseases to the know-it-alls on social media with no special background in diseases. I’ve seen people proclaim things like, All viruses eventually go away.” When I pointed out that HIV hasn’t gone away, this person came up with some lame brained rationalization.

    So in general, I’ll take the information given by scienstist and people like Garrett over the musings of people on social media who seem to think they’ve earned social media certificates of mastery in epidemiology and virology and throw around uninformed statements on social media I don’t always expect the experts to be right because this is a new disease and new information will continue to come in, but I find it hard to believe some of the uninformed ignorant blather from people with no background in disease who seem to fancy themselves qualified to issue declerations about covid and social media. The ignorance at times is truly astounding.

    I agree that some of the responses to covid-19 haven’t made much sense. For example, it didn’t make sense that small stores had to close while big box sotres were allowed to remain open. As long as smaller stores followed the same guidleines as larger stores, it didn’t make any sense to me that smaller stores had to close.

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