Because a person sitting there breathing put virus for a couple hours is leaving a vastly higher viral load for towers than a person who is only there 30 minutes.
But isn’t 1 person sitting for 2 hours contributing about the same viral load as 4 people who each sit for 30 minutes?
I don’t know know if cycling people through faster will increase the number of people who want to eat at a place. I think it would just increase the number of empty tables.
If the goal is fewer people at a time, or fewer total person-hours in an evening, I’d rather regulate that directly. That avoids weird side effects.
For instance, my state experimented with limiting the time you could stay in a restaurant to 90 minutes. A coworker organized a birthday party, and felt that was overly restrictive. So she made three reservations at three neighboring restaurants, and the party just moved from one to another. I can’t imagine the 90 minute limit produced any net benefit.
Decreasing the time spent would work if it didn’t result in more people coming to the place to eat. The more people who cycle through, the more likely you’ll get someone that actually has covid.
It seems to me that people have forgotten the studies done early on that showed infections occurring from bad ventilation. Unless you know that the restaurant has upgraded their HVAC systems, you are taking a chance that covid is circulating in the air. It doesn’t matter how far you are away from an infected person if you are sitting in the air stream. And the air doesn’t stop moving because you are eating. People are so eager to get back to “normal” that they don’t want to think about that anymore.
We know enough about Covid now to be able to say that the chances of spreading enough of a viral load in 90 seconds to infect somebody is nearly non-existent. Even if you’re shoulder-to-shoulder with the other person.
Close Contact through proximity and duration of exposure: Someone who was less than 6 feet away from infected person (laboratory-confirmed or a clinical diagnosis) for a cumulative total of 15 minutes or more over a 24-hour period (for example, three individual 5-minute exposures for a total of 15 minutes).
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/php/contact-tracing/contact-tracing-plan/appendix.html
262,429,526 total cases
5,224,812 dead
236,988,470 recovered
In the US:
49,301,070 total cases
801,326 dead
39,032,255 recovered
Yesterday’s numbers for comparison:
Here’s some news:
Germany:
According to Johns Hopkins site, there are new seven-day-averaged record highs in reported new cases in two states
New Hampshire – 1144, far higher than the peak of 863 back on January 8
Vermont – 420 --higher than the peaks earlier this month and more than twice as high as the levels reported in January.
I had regarded these two states as pretty sage until now.
Maine had a new record high a week ago – 694 cases – but the rest of New England has been well below previous highs.
Michigan set a new record of 8793 on November 16, and has oscillated since then.
The good news is that, as a whole, the new cases in the US are going down, after seeing a slight and ominous rise. But we’ll see what happens now that omicron is here.
I don’t think they’re really going down. We had Thanksgiving last Thursday. Holidays always skew the numbers.
Some people cannot be awakened.
Brazil, Japan:
Merck gets go-ahead:
I’m not sure about Vermont, but an issue here in New Hampshire is kids spreading it through schools, especially kids younger than 10. 1/4th to 1/3rd of our new cases every day for weeks have been young kids and only 13% of the 5-11 year olds have been vaccinated yet.
One of my friends had her two kids who are 6 and 9 got their first dose a couple of weeks ago, and the older one tested positive this week. Wish the vaccine approval had come a few weeks sooner 
Another thing that concerns me, is that the percentage of deaths recently among people over the age of 60 has dropped to about 75%, over the past few days fluctuating between 72% and 82% each day. 25ish percent being no older than 59 is a lot when at the beginning over 80% of our deaths were amongst nursing home residents, and those numbers then didn’t include the younger and/or fitter elderly who were living at home still.
263,035,743 total cases
5,233,046 dead
237,521,026 recovered
In the US:
49,428,913 total cases
803,045 dead
39,205,902 recovered
Yesterday’s numbers for comparison:
Not sure why that should be surprising or concerning. If vaccination levels in older groups are higher than those in younger groups then you would expect those percentages to change.
What matters of course is the overall numbers dying now, compared to previous waves and compared to equivalent infection numbers from previous waves.
In the US, about 86% of 65+ are fully vaccinated (though I don’t know how many have also already had the booster), while the all-ages rate is 59%.
Damn! New Hampshire set a new record high yesterday at 1383 !
And Vermont has set a new high at 484 yesterday