Protecting Others

My husband and I have been very careful to wear masks when we go to the grocery store and to sanitize ourselves and our goods when we get home. That's pretty straightforward. But who protects people when places reopen. Our youngest son is a chef, executive chef at a small restaurant in Utah. The governor there is echoing the conservative call to reopen businesses but so far it doesn't seem that much thought has been put into it.

Restaurants are one of the more highly regulated industries in any city or town. The food that comes to the restaurants is watched carefully, the restaurants themselves are inspected carefully and constantly, and that is how it should be. Careless food preparation or careless food service are both responsible for illness and death, as shown by the recent monetary decision punishing Chipotle for spreading the novovirus. Oddly enough, strong employment numbers always exacerbate that issue because fewer people apply for the jobs that are hard, require long hours, and don't necessarily need extensive training. But responsible restaurants and good public health vigilance work together to provide service to customers.

But who protects those workers? It has been an ongoing issue that customers abuse the privilege of eating out, blowing their noses on the napkins and leaving the debris on the plates for others to pick up. But this pandemic raises an entirely different level of complaint and problem. My son's restaurant is an adjunct to an older restaurant, usually ranked as the most popular in the state,  and is very small. That means there is a much more personal level of service.

The governor of Utah wants to override city and county restrictions on restaurants but he wants to do so without protecting the chefs, the line cooks, the servers, the busboys, the dishwashers. People are protected from restaurants that flout the rules. People who work in restaurants have to pass tests to get food licenses. Who protects them from their customers?

Clearly you cannot ask patrons at a restaurant to wear a mask which would defeat the purpose of going out to eat. Add to that the problem that most restaurants do not provide any sort of health insurance for their workers as they are and will remain among the worst paid people in the country. Yes, they know that when they take the job or choose the profession as my son did as a teenager. But who protects them from Covid19, an entirely different virus that kills?

How can the state order people back to work without providing testing and care?

Hithery, dithery Don
Tried to run a con.
But Fauci knew
and so do you--

The moron is Don John