A DOSE OF RELIEF
Retailers and restaurants on the front lines of reopenings for maskless, vaccinated masses.
It’s been a week of good news on the vaccine front, and if we’re reading between the lines that means we’re likely to soon see a lot more maskless faces again inside Houston’s businesses.
The region is alive with kinetic energy. Traffic is back, people are packing businesses again and we’re starting to see people confidently go maskless, assuring people, “Don’t worry. I’m vaccinated.”
It’s a bold move, to be sure, but the information coming out of the Centers for Disease Control doesn’t necessarily dispute it. The CDC said last week that vaccinated people are 90 percent less likely to catch COVID, and what you don’t catch you can’t as easily give to others.
Houstonians are accustomed to freak accidents and weatherrelated dangers, and the city is the largest in the nation without a mask mandate, so we’re likely to be on the cutting edge of the cultural shift away from masks.
The front lines of this social experiment will be retailers and restaurants. Some have already scrambled over the last month, for the safety of their staff, to vaccinate whole teams and inoculate themselves against the potential for maskless masses. (The number of people on waiting lists for vaccinations spiked after Gov. Greg Abbott announced he’d be rolling back his statewide mask mandate.)
Lindsay Rae Burleson, owner of Two Headed Dog in Midtown, told me two weeks ago that some resourceful members of Houston’s restaurant community crowdsourced vaccination information, and so her bar’s staff was fully vaccinated. After that, she and her team decided to remove the Plexiglas shield between bartenders and customers.
Beyond staff safety, now it’s a selling point for consumerfacing businesses to have vaccinated employees. The CDC said it was safe to gather indoors with other vaccinated people. The question is whether restaurants and retailers now advertise, signs and all, that their teams are fully vaccinated so vaccinated customers can enter without need for a mask.
Maskless life should be a boon for them: Who wants to wear a mask while trying on clothes, going to the gym or having a drink at the bar?
But while all this vaccine news is good news, there are still plenty of people who haven’t been able to score appointments. Just a third of Harris County residents have been vaccinated, and cases were on the rise again last week in what’s being referred to as the fourth wave.
It’s still not easy to find a vaccination appointment, especially for those working long hours in restaurants and grocery stores who can’t as easily click away on their computers for hours until they find a place with an available slot — and they’re arguably the ones who need it most.
There’s no centralized location for people to sign up, and many may put their names on one waitlist and not realize others may be available to them, Jay Malone, the Texas Gulf Coast Area Labor Federation’s political and communications director, told me last week.
That’s why the federation and workers’ advocates are urging more employers to seek out institutional partners and host company-wide vaccination clinics to make it easier for their employees, especially those exposed to hundreds of customers per day. Doing so might just be good for business.