If you’ve dined indoors at a New York City restaurant over the past few months, you know the routine: You must fill in contact information on a form. That way, if someone tests positive for COVID-19, contact tracers can identify others who’ve eaten at the same restaurants and alert them that they may have been exposed.
Surely the tracers must know which restaurants, if any, have had many of its patrons infected. So why is New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo now threatening to ban all indoor dining, and put in other new restrictions, as COVID infections and hospitalizations rise, rather than focus only on eateries with a bad record?
And, by the way, are restaurants really even a vector of the spread? What, New Yorkers want to know, do the data say?
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The answer: We have no idea. Yes, you read that right.
This vital information — about the dangerousness of an industry that employs thousands of our citizens — has not been released. And not because no one’s asked for it: Staten Island City Councilman Joe Borelli, who increasingly seems like one of the last rational elected officials in the city, has tried and failed to obtain it, as have Rep.-elect Nicole Malliotakis and Council Minority Leader Steve Matteo.
