Fast food crowds could spell more clusters
Throngs of hungry people queuing outside restaurants have sparked concerns Kiwis’ hunger for takeaways could be our undoing as the country settles into Covid-19 alert level three.
Director-general of health Dr Ashley Bloomfield said he’d been among those who enjoyed a takeaway coffee at the first opportunity – but he urged people not to forget physical distancing rules.
‘‘It is important not to congregate outside the cafes or other places, or in the carparks of takeaway places like McDonald’s when you see old friends. We do not want to see the sorts of rebound that we have seen in other countries,’’ he warned.
On Tuesday evening, a crowd of more than 30 people queuing outside BurgerFuel in Auckland’s Glenfield had to be broken up by police.
The throng spilled onto the road, with many standing in close proximity to each other.
Photos of delivery drivers failing to maintain social distancing were also shared on social media, including at a McDonald’s in West Auckland.
One person on Twitter called the behaviour ‘‘predictable’’ when ‘‘everyone had been hanging out for a burger for a week’’.
That kind of thinking was shot down by another commenter: ‘‘I feel like hanging out for a burger isn’t a reason to endanger public health. It’s a way to create new clusters and send us back to level four. I like burgers but I also like people not dying.’’
So will this behaviour lead to new Covid-19 clusters?
‘‘There’s a possibility, no doubt about it,’’ said Dr Arindam Basu, associate professor of epidemiology and environmental health at University of Canterbury. But after four weeks spent mostly in our bubbles, that possibility is a lot lower than it was at the beginning of lockdown, he said.
Still, we shouldn’t get complacent. He cautioned that the nature of Covid19 meant it ‘‘only takes one or two people for it to flare up and become an epidemic again’’.
He pointed to South Korea, where a cluster based at a call centre led to a sudden jump in infections when it was thought the outbreak was under control.
The way to avoid that happening is to keep up social distancing and hygiene practices, get tested as soon as symptoms appear and keep a record of where you’ve been.
Keeping a record of the takeaways you’ve visited will make contact tracers’ lives easier if new cases are identified.
On Tuesday, some drive-thrus were so busy traffic management had to be set up.
At a press conference yesterday, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said she had seen the photos of crowds of people outside takeaways. She confirmed officials had been in touch with BurgerFuel to ensure it understood its obligations around social distancing.
Ardern there had been 742 complaints about businesses on the first day of level three, mostly about a lack of social distancing.
She said the Government would prefer to just warn businesses but would prosecute if needed.