How a state COVID report hurt restaurants unfairly
It’s been a tough few weeks for restaurants, one of the state’s top sources of jobs. The usual slow season has combined with high levels of COVID and public perceptions that indoor dining rivals cliff-diving and iceclimbing as a death-defying activity.
February brings hope on a few fronts. Many establishments now have their second installments of Paycheck Protection Program loans; Congress and President Joe Biden appear headed toward $25 billion in targeted aid to the industry.
The best news of all, COVID-19 illnesses, still at a high level, have fallen in Connecticut since the peak in mid-December. Gov. Ned Lamont extended a 10 p.m. curfew by another hour.
Normally the month that brings us the Super Bowl, Valentine’s Day and school vacations would deliver a least some highlights to restaurant owners and staff. But that perception gap remains huge.
The state has made it worse, unfairly to restaurants, with a report that came out last month, which is still making waves.
Simply put, the actual danger of eating inside a restaurant is not zero, but it’s a whole lot less than what most people think it is. And that gap is keeping restaurants way less full than the law allows — even as the economy recovers.
Oh, Brian Jessurun can tell you all about that gap in his small group of restaurants in Mansfield, Pomfret and Putnam.
There’s absolutely no evidence of significant outbreaks or community spread among restaurant customers outside their own groups.
There isn’t even publicly documented evidence of spread within restaurant customer groups — friends and family from different households who sit at the same table — though we suspect that’s happening.
And yet, on Jan. 4, two days before the siege on the U.S. Capitol, a major Connecticut news outlet had this headline in huge letters, played with maximum prominence: “Restaurants still a top infection spot.”
It was based on a state report that appeared to show exactly that after epidemiologists looked at a very small sample of COVID clusters.
Trouble is, the report showed nothing of the sort.
Two of the four national network-affiliate TV stations in Connecticut ran stories about the report.
“Restaurants and workplaces top the number of clusters,” one well-known veteran news reporter said on the air. She then talked about risky behaviors and interviewed a prominent infectious disease expert who warned people to wear masks in restaurants unless they’re actually eating and drinking.
At another TV station, an anchor introduced a story: “The Department of Public Health just released a report that takes a closer look at the coronavirus outbreaks here in our state and it shows restaurants, the workplace, nursing homes and child care facilities account for the highest number of clusters.”
The anchor then said the report was based on a “small sample of cases” and threw to a reporter who said the state is not making any policy decisions based on the data and is not drawing any conclusions because the numbers were so small.
By then, the damage was done.
“Headlines like that are impactful, really impactful,” said Jessurun, whose restaurants include Dog Lane Cafe at the Storrs Center, across from the University of Connecticut campus. “They erode our customer base, there’s no doubt about it.”
The report from the state documented 84 clusters of
COVID-19 cases, each one ranging in size from two to 67 cases. Restaurants accounted for 21 of those clusters, ranging in size from two cases to
16 cases. The median among the restaurant clusters was five cases.
In all, the report looked at somewhere between 800 and
1,100 cases, according to my calculations — it doesn’t give totals, only medians within categories. Restaurant cases amounted to about 135 cases, maybe a bit more, maybe less.
During the period of the report, from mid-July to Dec. 23, the state documented more than 120,000 cases. So the restaurant cases in the report amounted to perhaps one-tenth of 1 percent of the total.
Well, you might say, all of social science research is based on taking tiny samples and making informed assumptions about all of us, right? Election polls, unemployment numbers, attitudes toward religion or highway tolls — all of it is based on small samples.
True, but research is based on random samples of people, scientifically designed to reflect the whole. The state COVID outbreak report was not scientific, it was not randomized, it was not at any point ever intended to even be a study.
It was just a collection of outbreaks that happened to bubble up to the state Department of Health.
“Restaurants are coming up a lot partly because the local health departments have purview over restaurants,” said Lynn Sosa, deputy state epidemiologist. “It is what came to our attention, and so we would never say that this was representative of what was out there.”
I spoke with Sosa back in November, when an earlier version of the same report, containing 69 total outbreaks, showed a similar proportion in restaurants.
There was a round of media coverage for that report, too, including an online story on the Hearst Connecticut Media websites. Hearst did not report on the January version that added 25 cases, for a total of 84.
Large categories weren’t even included, such as schools, colleges and nursing homes. Think about this. Local health departments sent in examples of outbreaks they knew about. Local health departments regulate restaurants, so that’s what they know.
Ask me as a news columnist to name five examples of errors, and I’ll list headlines that went on the wrong stories. Ask a doctor and she’ll cite medical errors. Ask a town health director where he’s seeing COVID and, lo and behold, restaurants pop up.
That’s not science. Science is a more rigorous study done by the state of Massachusetts, cited by the Connecticut Restaurant Association, which showed less than one-half of 1 perent of cases came from restaurant spread.
Scott Dolch, head of the restaurant association, is saying all the right things. He’s not slamming the state that regulates his members or the media outlets that report on them because he knows that’s not smart.
We’re doing everything we can to make restaurants safe, he says, echoing Jessurun, who said he’s following all federal and state guidelines. We need more information than what was in this report, Dolch says.
What happened is an unfortunate result of democracy. People who work with information, including state health officials in a pandemic, gather lots of it and decide what to do with it later. That’s all that happened here. Sosa and his colleagues collected and compiled information.
Sosa told me the vast majority of restaurant outbreaks were among employees, mostly “back of the house,” not customers. “I can’t say that there was a restaurant outbreak where a worker gave it to a patron,” she said.
An enterprising news reporter found out about the report — really, just a compilation of arbitrary cases — and demanded to see it. Under open-government laws, the department handed it over.
“During a public health crisis, it’s important to be as forthcoming as possible with information,” public health department spokeswoman Maura Fitzgerald said in an emailed statement explaining the release of the report.
“This report was created for internal reporting purposes and was never intended for public consumption. However, when the information was requested, the decision was made to release it, along with a heavily caveated explanation of the report and how it should be interpreted.”
Rather than informal caveats, some of which were reported, I’d have rather seen the department say something like, “This collection of arbitrary cases is not even a report. It may help us do our jobs but it has zero statistical value, period.”
Instead, the report and the headlines it generated improperly hammered an industry trying to survive under conditions that are bad enough without errors of democracy.
Jessurun had half his staff quarantined at the Fenton River Grill in Mansfield — and that turned out to be based on what might have been false positive tests. That, he could not have avoided. The headlines are a different story.