The Los Angeles County Department of Public Health (LADPH) has imposed new restrictions on restaurants across the county as they prepare to re-open for outdoor dining, including a ban on the use of television screens and limits on the number of people who can be seated.
On Friday, restaurants across Los Angeles County were able to re-open for outdoor dining after being forced to only offer take-out and delivery services for the past several months.
However, under the newly-revised public health order, these restaurants will have to adhere to new restrictions as they work to re-establish their outdoor dining services.
“When people with COVID-19 cough, sneeze, sing, talk, or breathe, they produce respiratory droplets,” the health order reads. “According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the risk of COVID-19 spread increases in a restaurant setting (…) as individuals remove their face coverings while eating and drinking.
In addition to requiring employees to wear both a facial covering and a face shield “at all times while interacting with customers,” restaurants now have the following new restrictions they must adhere to:
- Outdoor dining table seating must be limited to no more than six people per table, all of whom must be from the same household. All establishments must post signage and verbally inform customers that everyone sharing a table must be from the same household.
- Outdoor dining and wine service seating must be reduced by 50%. Outdoor tables must be repositioned or removed so that all tables are at least eight feet apart.
- Televisions or other screens that broadcast programming must remain off until further notice
“Every person and every business must continue to take every precaution every day to prevent transmission,” Dr. Barbara Ferrer, director of the LADPH, said on Wednesday. “It’s really up to us whether we can sustain these re-openings without jeopardizing each other’s health and our ability to get more schools to reopen.”
The health order defines “household” as “persons living together as a single living unit and shall not include institutional group living situations such as dormitories, fraternities, sororities, monasteries, convents, or residential care facilities, nor does it include such commercial living arrangements such as boarding houses, hotels, or motels.”
Restaurants across the state were allowed to re-open for outdoor dining on Monday after Governor Gavin Newsom ended the Regional Stay-At-Home Order.
See Related: Restaurants, Personal Care Services Allowed To Reopen As Regional Stay-At-Home Order Lifted
However, restaurants within Los Angeles County were not permitted to open until Friday, as they had previously been reduced to take-out and delivery only by the LADPH back in November.
Towards the beginning of December, California Judge James Chalfant ruled against Los Angeles County’s decision to ban outdoor dining in the county, stating that county officials “acted arbitrarily,” and that the decision “lacks a rational relationship to a legitimate end.”
“The County clearly has failed to perform the required risk-benefit analysis,” Chalfant wrote on Dec. 8. “As part of the risks of the closure, the County could be expected to consider the economic cost of closing 30,000 restaurants, the impact to restaurant owners and their employees, and the psychological and emotional cost to a public tired of the pandemic and seeking some form of enjoyment in their lives.”
Chalfant cited the department’s own data in his ruling, which tracks all non-residential settings at which three or more laboratory-confirmed COVID cases have been identified. Out of the 204 locations on the list, fewer than 10% are restaurants, and of the 2,257 cases identified on the list, fewer than 5% originate from restaurants.
For their part, LADPH officials called their approach “scientific and common sense,” citing that COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations were beginning to surge at the time they were considering the outdoor dining ban, and stating that Chalfant “incorrectly analyzed” the decision by Public Health Officer Dr. Muntu Davis to issue the order.
“Davis made the decision to issue the restaurant closure order based on the evidence that COVID spreads most easily when individuals from different households are in close proximity to one another for prolonged periods of time, without wearing masks,” reads a portion of the department’s response listed in the over 50-page injunction. “Restaurant dining was the only remaining setting where this was largely still permitted, and while dining outdoors is less risky than dining indoors, the nature of dining together at a restaurant still presents a substantial risk of viral transmission.”
Within the injunction, the department admitted that they had “not conducted a clinical study on how outdoor dining affects the transmission rates of COVID,” arguing that such a study would “provide minimal value in deciding how to respond to an emergency like the COVID pandemic.”
“There is wide consensus that risk reduction in a pandemic does not require definitive proof that a particular sector or activity is the cause of an increase in cases,” the county’s evidence portion of the injunction reads. “Best practices dictate that public health departments identify those sectors and activities that present a higher risk of transmission and take steps to mitigate those risks, especially during a surge in cases and hospitalizations like we are now experiencing.”
The full health order can be read here.
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