California banned outdoor dining in December. It was controversial.

But there's an increasing evidence that the dining ban, along with the state's stay-at-home order, helped the state turn the corner on its awful COVID surge.

My latest, with @ronlin https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-02-01/california-stay-at-home-order-outdoor-dining-ban-covid-surge

California was headed to a very bad place this winter. But our actions helped flatten our curve. In early December, as new orders went into effect, Californians began moving around their communities at a rate 40% lower than what's typical, the lowest level since May.

In Los Angeles County, the stay-at-home orders and a ban on outdoor dining were followed by a drop in the COVID transmission rate. In other words, within roughly two weeks of the new orders in late November, the county began to turn the corner.

You might be thinking that it really didn't seem like we were turning the corner in late November or early December, in fact, things kept getting worse! But that's because of the lag time between new actions, infections and then hospitalizations.

Think of it like a giant ship heading in the wrong direction. You can start steering it in the right direction, but it takes a while for the ship to actually right its path. That's why we didn't see hospitalizations slow until January, even though we made positive changes earlier

So, outdoor dining. I have nothing against restaurants, and I've eaten outdoors during the pandemic. But at some point, experts of outdoor dining were just too high given the sheer numbers of people infected with COVID at any given time. Some estimates put it at 1 in 20 in LA.

It's outdoors, but patrons can't keep their masks on, guests at the same table aren’t six feet apart and spend a long time together — violating many tenets of risk reduction. Outdoor dining would be safer if limited to members of the same household, but that often wasn't the case

Epidemiologists said the ban 1) signaled to the public that the coronavirus storm was worsening 2) eliminated a real risk: If an outdoor White House Rose Garden ceremony nominee could become a super-spreader event, it could easily happen on a restaurant patio.

The criticism of the outdoor dining ban has been that the data is too thin. But that kind of detailed data do not exist for diseases that have been around for much longer, and for a bunch of other things we readily accept as true.

California health secretary Dr. Mark Ghaly told us: “A lot of people said, ‘You’re closing this down, but there’s no proof.’ Well, it’s not that there’s no proof. It’s just not the proof that people want to see."

And waiting to act could have resulted in more deaths, experts say.

“We’re building the airplane while we’re flying ... I think we need a little leeway in trying to protect the public from a disease that’s killed more people in 10 months than we lost in all of World War II.”

CA officials estimate the stay-at-home order & outdoor dining ban saved 25,000 people from severe COVID.

Ghaly said that three weeks after the orders — even if “residents aren’t 100% compliant with it” — the curve began to flatten, a pattern straight out of a “COVID textbook.”

I think there were a lot of reasons the outdoor dining ban upset people so much:
--in LA, it was the first and only sector that closed when our surge started, so it seemed punitive against restaurants
--it's something very popular in CA because of our weather!

--it's an outdoor activity, and understanding COVID risk communication is often simplified to "indoors bad, outdoors good"
--it's something that was allowed and then was taken away, which no one ever likes
--the Newsom French laundry incident

and finally, I think it was so controversial because it is something that probably could be done safely if there was more enforcement of rules and the prevalence of the virus in the community was relatively low

if everyone really only went with people they lived with and the tables were really far away from each other, then it would be relatively low risk. but officials gave up on trying to tell people only to go with people of their own household, because it couldn't be enforced

now that outdoor dining is reopening, I have no idea what's going to happen. so much mixed messaging

in LA, officials say you can only eat with members of your household. but CA HHS secretary Ghaly says: "If you miss a friend, you can go out to eat together."