The Restaurant Association of Maryland is calling on Montgomery County to lift its ban on indoor dining at restaurants — and the owner of three pizza shops there agrees.
Potomac Pizza owner Adam Greenberg joined other restaurateurs in calling for an end to the indoor dining ban that’s been in place since mid-December, citing falling coronavirus transmission rates and the role of eateries in community cohesion.
“Restaurants are not where the spread is coming from — New York has realized that, Chicago has realized that, every other county in the state of Maryland has realized that,” said Greenberg, who also serves as head of the Potomac Chamber of Commerce.
“People are not looking for handouts; they just want to be able to go to work, earn a living and do their jobs … and right now, the county has made it really difficult for us and our fellow restaurants to do that.”
Montgomery County is the only remaining county in Maryland with an extant ban on indoor dining, originally imposed Dec. 10 amid skyrocketing infection rates.
Neighboring Prince George’s County recently brought back indoor dining at a quarter of full capacity. Baltimore and D.C. welcomed diners back indoors with seating restrictions last week.
The Restaurant Association of Maryland echoed Greenberg’s sentiment in a statement Wednesday following a briefing from Montgomery County Executive Marc Elrich.
“It remains grossly unfair that thousands of restaurant employees in Montgomery County are being asked to accept the burden of not being permitted to work when there is no evidence that restaurants are a cause of COVID spread,” the group said.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention considers indoor dining with reduced seating and 6-foot spacing between tables to be “higher risk” than other activities, such as takeout or outdoor dining, due to the potential for airborne transmission in enclosed spaces with poor ventilation, though research suggests it is more common for the virus to spread through close contact with an infected person.
County government spokesman Barry L. Hudson said in an emailed statement to WTOP: “Our cases are declining because we focused on strategies, such as suspending indoor dining, to minimize transmission. Contact tracing data through the Maryland COVIDLink system has shown that since the suspension of indoor dining, there has been a 40-60% reduction in the number of County restaurant workers that have tested positive for COVID-19.”
Data from the Maryland Department of Health shows COVID-19 testing positivity rates have been steadily declining in Montgomery County and throughout the state after peaking in early January, as have the number of patients currently hospitalized with the disease.
Though both are promising indicators, the statewide seven-day average of daily new cases remained around 2,000 as of Wednesday morning — a figure that, though trending downward for the last two weeks, is still nearly twice the peak of the original outbreak last spring.
Montgomery County had a seven-day average of about 355 new cases per day on Wednesday, down from a peak — and pandemic record — of 512 per day on Jan. 12.
