Indoor dining to resume today
Restaurants will be restricted to 25% capacity; mayor tightens other COVID-19 reopening rules
Baltimore restaurants can resume indoor dining at 25% capacity starting at 5 p.m. today, Mayor Bernard C. “Jack” Young announced Thursday, but other coronavirus-related restrictions will be tightened.
Two weeks ago, Young ordered eateries to suspend all indoor service in response to a spike in COVID-19 cases in the city and Maryland.
This gradual relaxing of the rule is an attempt to help restaurants weather the financial impact of the ongoing pandemic, though the city is still seeing troubling trends in both new cases and deaths.
“This reopening does not mean that we are in the clear as it relates to the pandemic, but rather that I want to support our residents facing extreme financial hardships as a result of working in the restaurant and service industry,” Young said in a statement.
Restaurants are still able to serve additional people with outdoor seating and offer carryout.
Public health experts have warned that the coronavirus spreads between people more easily when they are indoors, and that bars in particular pose a very high risk for transmission. Spokesman James Bentley said the mayor’s order only applies to restaurants, while bars are not cleared to reopen.
Young’s executive order also imposes other restrictions, all of which are stricter than what the state currently allows. They include:
■ Outdoor gatherings capped at 25 people
■ Indoor gatherings capped at 25% of
nane, pointed to rising numbers of COVID-19 cases, the availability of testing and the turnaround times for results as contributing to the decision. Expectations of the virus dying down over the summer did not materialize, he said in a post Thursday on the college’s website.
“That transition would have given us the opportunity to open the University as scheduled,” Linnane said. “Unfortunately, the data have proven that did not happen.”
Hopkins said it will reduce undergraduate tuition, which is about $28,500 a semester, by 10% for the fall.
When classes begin Aug. 31, the Homewood campus, which normally hosts 5,000 undergrads will be decidedly quieter than past years. Some limited activity will remain, such as in research labs that are operating at lower densities and with other safety and distancing measures. Graduate programs also will largely go remote with a few exceptions.
Dr. Tom Inglesby, who directs the Center for Health Security at the Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, said the combination of several trends both locally and nationally, particularly as they affect younger populations contributed to the decision to keep the campus largely closed.
The daily rate of new infections has gone from about 10 per 100,000 population in Baltimore in June to 28 per 100,000 currently, said Inglesby, who has been advising both Republican Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan and Hopkins administrators throughout the pandemic.
“We also were concerned that approaching a third of the students are coming from places experiencing their own resurging epidemics,” Inglesby said.
“At this point, a lot of the spread is in the young-adult category,” he said.
Hopkins previously announced that students at its public health school and the Peabody Conservatory, both in Baltimore, and the School of Advanced International Studies in Washington would take all their classes remotely.
Alanna W. Shanahan, vice provost for student affairs at Hopkins, called the decision “painstaking and heartbreaking.”
But bringing students and faculty back on campus, and to Baltimore, was just too risky for both Hopkins and the city, she said.
“It just was not worth it for anybody,” Shanahan said.
Shanahan said some students will be allowed to live on campus under special and limited circumstances, such as if their homes are not conducive to learning or they suffer from food insecurity.
Hopkins will offer financial assistance to students who may incur expenses from staying home, or who have bought nonrefundable plane tickets or can’t get out of leases they signed for off-campus housing.
Shanahan said she hopes much of what is missed this fall can be transferred to spring, such as classes that require a lab component, for example, and the new friendships and “community building” that make up so much of the first-year experience.
In the final weeks before college students across the country were scheduled to move into their dormitories for the academic year, many schools decided to abandon earlier plans to offer a hybrid model of instruction in which at least some classes would meet on campus.
The Chronicle of Higher Education found that fewer than half the 1,260 schools it has been tracking were going to reopen their campuses in the fall, compared with about three-quarters who had planned at least some inperson courses and activities back in May.
While the window is closing for deciding whether to allow on-campus instruction this fall, schools say they’re continuing to monitor the ever-changing public health landscape.
Noting that many in the region, such as Georgetown, George Washington and American universities in Washington, are going the all-online route, Inglesby said colleges need to be guided by the course of the pandemic.
“I would say that it’s important for people making decisions,” he said, “to understand all the data.”
Shanahan agreed: “You have to keep your ear to the ground.”
“It just was not worth it for anybody.”
— Alanna W. Shanahan, vice provost for student affairs at Johns Hopkins