Gym owners resist potential COVID closures
Joe Gworek just wants to keep his doors open.
Gworek, 39, owns The CLUB Health & Fitness and Naugatuck Valley Athletics. Like many gym and fitness club owners, he closed his Naugatuck facility for months during the first wave of the coronavirus and, since reopening in June, he said he has followed rules on masking, sanitizing and other COVID protocols.
Now, as a second wave of COVID is rising, Gworek is worried that gyms will get shut down again, and he said that could be catastrophic for him and other owners.
“If we’re shut down, our employees are out of work,” he said. “They have families to take care of. They have bills they have to pay. It doesn’t make sense what they’re doing, honestly.”
Gworek is one of the leaders of Keep CT Fit, a group of gym and fitness center owners that launched a Change.org petition, protesting an effort by Connecticut doctors to persuade Gov. Ned Lamont to close indoor dining and gyms. Late last month, a group of 43 health care providers wrote a letter to Lamont, urging him to close the businesses to help prevent the spread of COVID-19.
That group was led by Dr. Luke Davis, an attending physician at Yale New Haven Hospital and an associate professor at the Yale School of Public Health and the Yale School of Medicine. The letter argued that limiting indoor gatherings, and closing gyms and indoor dining could keep hospitals from getting overwhelmed until a vaccine is fully available.
“Based on what we know about the epidemiology of COVID-19, we are confident that a decision to close indoor dining and gyms and ban all other unnecessary public gatherings would protect our citizens from this lethal disease, keep our hospitals and caregivers from becoming overwhelmed, and save lives,” the letter read.
Restaurant workers are already
planning to protest at Lamont’s residence on Monday in an effort to keep him from shutting down indoor dining.
Now Keep CT Fit is pushing back in its petition, signed by more than 10,000 people. The petition claims gyms have not been a primary source of COVID outbreaks.
Gworek pointed to state Department of Public Health research released last month that showed four out of 69 COVID clusters identified in Connecticut were associated with “sports facilities.” Comparatively, the data showed 20 were linked to restaurants and 14 were associated with workplaces.
However, when the information was released, a DPH spokesman could not provide more information about the agency’s report. It’s unknown if there have been more clusters in Connecticut, and if so, why they were not included in the report.
But Gworek said there’s more evidence that shows gyms are not a primary COVID spreader. He cited a European study published in October that analyzed more than 62 million fitness facility
visits since September and found only 487 positive cases reported from operators based in Germany, France, Sweden, Belgium, Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, Norway, Switzerland, Czech Republic, Poland, Denmark, Luxembourg and the United Kingdom.
Lamont said gyms might not be a significant source of COVID spread, but they are a factor to the surge of cases.
“They’re not a major source of spread, but everything’s a small source of spread, and when you have a 7 percent positivity rate and more community spread, you keep a look at this all the time,” Lamont said Thursday.
“We’re doing everything we can to keep these places open safely,” he added.
Since reopening, Gworek said he has been following the state’s COVID guidelines, and they seem to be working.
“We’ve been open six months (since the shutdown) and we haven’t a had single (COVID) case come out of the club,” he said. “People are more aware anyway. They’re being more cautious. Members are more careful about wiping machines down before
and after use.”
Keep CT Fit was launched in March after the gyms first closed, said Ioannis Kaloidis, owner of Anytime Fitness in Waterbury.
“We wanted to make sure gym owners had a voice in Hartford to advocate for the reopening of the gyms,” he said. “Now we’re hoping to prevent shutdown of the gyms.”
Like Gworek, Kaloidis said there were no COVID cases that he knew of linked to his gym. “We want to stay open with ideally as few restrictions as possible, but we’re willing to do what we need to do to stay open,” Kaloidis said.
Kaloidis said he’s not just worried about the future of the gyms themselves, but of their clientele. “I talked to one guy who told me that, during the shutdown, he gained 40 pounds because he was so inactive,” he said.
Gworek and Kaloidis also pointed out the mental and emotional strain many people are feeling due to the pandemic, and said exercise can help alleviate that tension. “Seasonal depression is a problem,” Kaloidis said. “People are isolated. It’s only going to get worse in the winter months.”
Davis said he’s sympathetic to the gym owners and their clientele, but with cases in the state rising and people starting to flood hospitals, he and other care providers are looking for ways to slow spread — at least until the bulk of people here are vaccinated.
“We’re so close to getting the vaccine — we need just a little bit of breathing room until we get to that point,” he said.
He said the DPH data about COVID clusters likely doesn’t represent all the outbreaks in the state. Davis also pointed to research showing that gyms and dining are factors to COVID spread.
That includes a study published last month in the journal Nature, which examined the spring COVID outbreak in the Chicago area and identified full-service restaurants and fitness center as some of the places with high risk of transmission. However, the research showed indoor dining and fitness centers “contributed less to the predicted number of infections over time, probably because of lockdown orders to close these (businesses).”
Ultimately, Davis said, the hot spots for COVID spread are still somewhat unknown partly because so many people with the disease are asymptomatic. “I think it would be hard to ever know unless we’re doing really massive testing,” he said.
Gyms have been seen as potential danger spots, because people tend to breathe harder while exercising, Davis said. “When you exercise, you’re breathing 10 to 20 times more than normal, and if you have COVID, you’re just pouring that out into the air,” he said.
But Davis added that he knows the gyms are struggling and most owners are doing all they can to keep people safe. “I don’t want to pick a fight with the gyms,” he said. “What they do is critical. I think we need to think creatively about how we’re going to get through the next few weeks.”