All eyes are on bars as virus surges
When the bars in Michigan reopened in June, Tony Hild forgot about face masks, social distancing and caution, and headed out to Harper’s Restaurant and Brewpub, a popular spot in the college town of East Lansing. There was a line out the door. Inside were 200 people dancing, drinking and shouting over the music.
“It was just so crowded, and I’m like, ‘This is going against everything I’m told not to do,’ ” said Hild, 23, a college student. “But I didn’t think I was going to get it.”
As people eager for a night out flood back into public after months of confinement, public health experts say that collegetown bars, nightclubs and corner taverns are becoming dangerous new hot spots for the coronavirus, seeding infections in thousands of mostly young adults and adding to surging cases nationwide.
Louisiana health officials tied at least 100 coronavirus cases to bars in the Tigerland nightlife district in Baton Rouge. Minnesota has traced 328 recent cases to bars across the state.
And in East Lansing, home to Michigan State University, nearly 140 cases have been linked to Harper’s, Hild included.
He came down with a sore throat, chest pains and fatigue, and by then — more than a week later — he already had visited four other restaurants.
“I definitely regret doing it,” he said. The outbreak, the largest in the county and possibly the state, prompted Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan to announce Wednesday that she was closing indoor seating in bars in parts of the state, including East Lansing.
Public health experts say that the long nights, lack of inhibitions and shoulder-to-shoulder confines inside so many bars — a source of community and relaxation in normal times — now make them ideal breeding grounds for the coronavirus. Now it’s closing time — again. Governors in Texas, California and Arizona, where coronavirus cases are soaring, have ordered hundreds of newly reopened bars to shut down. Less than two weeks after Colorado’s bars reopened at limited capacity, Gov. Jared Polis ordered them to close.
In other states, local health inspectors have fined bars and revoked their liquor licenses for allowing huge crowds and flouting other new health regulations aimed at curbing the spread of the virus.
Even Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, this week addressed the issue of bars, which he deemed “really not good,” adding, “Congregation in a bar inside is bad news.”
The whipsawing rules have incited a backlash from bar owners who say that bars are being singled out and scapegoated by politicians and on social media as symbols of America’s reckless reopening.
They worry that a second round of closures will destroy their businesses, and question why bars are being targeted for closure while Americans in some states can still eat inside restaurants, wheeze on fitness-center treadmills and shop at malls.
In Texas, a group of bar owners sued Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, over his order last week closing the state’s bars, saying that the state’s taverns had been “relegated to Gov. Abbott’s loser category and sentenced to bankruptcy.” The closures also spurred protests at the governor’s mansion and at the Texas State Capitol.
But bars are often smaller and narrower than restaurants, with fewer windows, weaker ventilation systems and less space to squeeze by another person. Pounding music forces people to shout into one another’s faces, spraying more viral particles into the air.
Unlike restaurants where small groups stay at their own tables, bar patrons often linger and mix with one another for hours as drinks dull their caution, including about masks and social distancing.
Even the conversations that animate so many evenings at bars — the laughs, the boasts, the stories and jokes — can release 10 times as many particles as a cough, experts say.