Sobering reminder
Packed bars serve up new rounds of COVID-19 contagion
Astates ease their lockdowns, bars have emerged as fertile breeding grounds for the coronavirus. They create a risky cocktail of tight quarters, young adults unbowed by the fear of illness and, in some instances, proprietors who don’t enforce crowd limits and social distancing rules.
Public health authorities have identified bars as the locus of outbreaks in Louisiana, Florida, Wyoming and Idaho. The governors of California, Arizona and Texas recently ordered bars to close again after surges of COVID-19 cases in those states.
Ahead of the closures in Texas, the state’s alcohol licensing board had suspended the liquor licenses of 17 bars for flouting emergency rules that required patrons to keep a safe distance from one another and limit occupancy.
Adriana Megas found Handlebar Houston
People almost don’t want to social distance if they go to the bar. People will often be loud, and if they have forceful speech, that’s going to create more droplets. so crowded when she went one night that she left. “They weren’t counting who came in and came out,” said Megas, 38, a nursing student. “Nobody was wearing any masks. You would never think COVID happened.”
The owners of Handlebar Houston, one of the bars whose licenses were suspended, did not respond to requests for comment. Megas said she and her friends drove by five other jammed bars on their way home. “Every single bar was filled,” she said.
In Boise, Idaho, at least 152 people have been diagnosed with COVID-19 in cases that health authorities linked to people who, unaware they were infectious, visited bars and nightclubs, officials said. In late June, the Central Health District, which oversees four counties, rolled back its reopening rules to shutter bars and nightclubs in Boise’s Ada County.
Bars are tailor-made for the spread of the virus, with a loud atmosphere that requires raised voices. The alcohol can impede judgment about diligently following rules meant to prevent contagion.
“People almost don’t want to social distance if they go to the bar,” said Dr. Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins
University Center for Health Security in Baltimore. “People will often be loud, and if they have forceful speech, that’s going to create more droplets.”
On top of that, the very act of drinking is incompatible with wearing a mask, a primary way of limiting the spread of infection. Public health experts say many patrons are young adults who may think they are impervious to the coronavirus.
It’s certainly less lethal for them: Fewer than 4 percent of adults in their 20s with COVID-19 have been hospitalized, compared with 22 percent of those in their 60s, according to the federal Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention. Only 1 in 1,000 COVID-19 patients in their 20s die from the virus.
Nonetheless, as bars and other public places have reopened, rates of infection in younger adults have surged, and bars are a particularly dangerous vector. Several outbreaks have been traced to bars that cater to college students.
In Baton Rouge, Louisiana, health authorities have received reports of more than 100 instances of positive COVID-19 tests tied to bar visits and bar employees in Tigerland, a neighborhood frequented by Louisiana State University students.
Reggie Chatman, a 23-year-old LSU graduate and sports reporter at a Baton Rouge television station, said he was surprised at how crowded the Tigerland bars were when he drove past them on a recent weekend.
“It looked like a football weekend. It was unbelievable, just seeing that many people walking around,” he said. “I didn’t see one mask out there at all.”
There are about 43,000 bars in the country. As many states permit them to reopen, authorities have enacted various measures to mitigate the chances of infection.
J.C. Diaz, president of the American Nightlife Association, which represents bars and clubs, said it has been harder for bars to enforce mask-wearing because it has been so politicized. “The problem now is people are not adhering to the mitigation measures,” he said. “We’re doing what we can do to prevent the spread of COVID, but if you are a reckless guest who doesn’t care about the health of others, you shouldn’t be out.”
Masks alone cannot solve the problem, said Dr. Ray Niaura, interim chair of the epidemiology department at New York University’s School of Global Public Health.
The risk of contagion is impossible to eliminate at bars, especially since many infected people are asymptomatic. “Even if you distance tables, you’re still going to have groups of people together,” he said.
Kaiser Health News is a national health policy news service. It is an editorially independent program of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation which is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.