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A family-owned restaurant in Kentucky donated $ 60,000 to its employees a day before the governor issued an executive order ordering the closure of all restaurants inside to fight the coronavirus.
Kentucky restaurants had to stop eating indoors from 5 p.m. Friday and remain closed to on-site dining until December 13, by order of Governor Andy Beshear. He said the move, along with other restrictions, was needed to tackle an increase in coronavirus cases, hospitalizations and deaths.
The governor said in a statement that the restrictions were not a “stop”, but were “surgical and targeted measures designed to slow the spread of the virus and protect our people”.
But Britney Miller, CEO of Jeff Ruby Culinary Entertainment, which operates seven steakhouses in Kentucky, Tennessee and Ohio, said the governor’s order came without warning and with no unemployment plan in place.
The day before the ban, two of Ruby’s steakhouses – one in Louisville and one in Lexington – announced that 100% of its sales would go to its employees on leave.
Miller told Fox News the restaurant tried to keep as many employees as possible, but had to fire more than half of its 160 employees after Friday. While restaurants may continue to offer take-out and deliveries, Miller said restaurants are relying on indoor dining to pay their bills. Plus, she says, outdoor dining isn’t practical.
Jeff Ruby’s Steakhouse, one of seven establishments in Kentucky, Ohio, and Tennessee.
(Provided)
“You really have to get people dining inside the building to keep the lights on and people to work,” Miller said. “There just isn’t a huge demand for transportation and delivery.
Miller lamented how restaurants bear the brunt of restrictions whenever there is an increase in coronavirus cases, citing experts who have said restaurants are not the super-spreaders they are typically described as .
“The problem we also have is that restaurants are not causing this spread. Health commissioners and epidemiologists have told me that restaurants actually help compensate for gatherings of people, ”she said. “You are in a regulated environment. And we know the cause that’s going on here is at big gatherings, family gatherings. And so, it’s just frustrating. We are distinguished. ”
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However, studies have suggested that bars and restaurants contribute significantly to the spread of the coronavirus. But these results have been disputed by the National Restaurant Association, among other groups.
A report released in September by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggested that in-person meals at restaurants where mask use and social distancing are difficult to maintain pose a greater risk of exposure than places like restaurants. gyms or shopping centers.
“Masks cannot be worn effectively while eating and drinking, while shopping and many other activities indoors do not preclude the use of a mask,” the report says, which suggests catering on site could present “significant risk factors associated with [COVID-19] infection.”
More recently, researchers from Stanford University, among other institutions, published a study in the journal Nature, which concluded that “on average, in metropolitan areas, full-service restaurants, gyms, hotels, cafes, religious organizations and limited-service restaurants produced the largest expected increase in infections when opened. ”
The Nation Restaurant Association, however, criticized this predictive modeling, telling Fox News that such studies are “full of errors” due to the complexity of the real world.
In a statement, the group said: “the lack of contact tracing and public health data determining who among the groups actually contract the virus and without a higher level of specificity in where they contracted it. , using a modeling exercise with anonymized location data from mobile devices is not an acceptable way to determine that restaurants are a probable cause of virus transmission. ”
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Still, Miller noted the economic impact of general restaurant closures, adding that the industry employs 10% of the U.S. workforce – a figure that’s doubled when factoring in ancillary businesses.
“Congress is dragging its feet right now. They have to put politics aside. We need the Senate and the House to come together and start negotiations, ”Miller said. “Not having relief for employees right now, for people who are on leave or laid off and not having an unemployment plan in place for those people – especially during the holidays – is heartbreaking.
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