Starting the day after Christmas, Shelby County residents will be under a "Safer at Home" order. The new regulations—released Monday afternoon by the health department—are less wide-reaching than those enacted and subsequently lifted earlier this spring as the coronavirus gained a local foothold.
Under the newest health directive, restaurants can keep their dining rooms open but only at 25 percent capacity. However, officials are discouraging onsite dining because transmission of the virus is so high. Retailers—including grocers—and gyms will also need to drop their occupancy to 50 percent.
“This is absolutely necessary. We’re seeing an unprecedented increase in the number of cases, which is going to lead to an unprecedented number of deaths,” says Dr. Manoj Jain, an infectious disease expert who also serves on the Memphis and Shelby County COVID-19 Joint Task Force.
The Health Department says there are on average about six new deaths from the virus each day. Hospitals are also reaching their limits. At the end of last week, over 95 percent of ICU beds were full, although that number fluctuates daily.
The state’s top health official, Dr. Lisa Piercy, hassaid that if Tennessee experiences another surge of cases after Christmas, it “will completely break our hospitals.”
Mid-South residents are urged to shelter at home as much as possible through January 22 under the new health mandate, but Jain says if people don’t and gather over Christmas, further restrictions could follow.
“We need to take this step by step,” he says. “Let’s begin with this and yes, if things get worse, then we will have to see what else we can do to better protect the community.”
The latest health guidelines allow personal grooming shops such as barbers, hair and nail salons and massage therapists to continue to operate, provided clients make an appointment. In general, all non-essential workers at businesses are encouraged to work remotely.
Some restaurant owners rallied in downtown Memphis Monday afternoon to push back against possible closures. The health department ultimately decided against a leaked, draft version of the health directive that circulated this weekend, which would have required eateries and other non-essential retailers to pivot to curbside or take-out services.
Many say the economic hit of another shutdown would be too hard to come back from again.
“I’m not saying we should be careless and walk around without masks, but what I’m saying is we should be allowed to make a living,” Lana Hickey, the owner of Crave Coffee Bar and Bistro in Arlington, said during Monday's gathering, which was broadcast by several media outlets. “We’re not corporate, we don’t have a bailout plan in a couple of weeks. We literally, some of us, lose our lives savings.”
Others said health department contact tracing data doesn’t indicate that restaurants are a primary source of transmission.
But, Melissa McPhetters, a health policy research professor at Vanderbilt University, says because transmission of the virus is so widespread, it’s currently really hard to trace where someone may have become infected. She says anywhere people gather, including restaurants, are really risky.
“The health departments at this point, they’re just trying to prevent as many opportunities for the virus to spread as possible,” she says. “As much transmission as we have, you almost can’t quite be quite as targeted. You really have to just shut things down so that people don’t congregate.”
A study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also found that eating in a restaurant raised the riskof contracting the virus.