Many restaurant employees expressed anxiety about returning to work indoors before being vaccinated.
Photo: Scott Heins
Mondays are full of surprises. Here’s one: indoor meals will be allowed in New York on Friday, instead of the previously announced Valentine’s Day date on Sunday, Governor Andrew Cuomo announced today. Restaurants will only be able to reopen at 25% capacity for now, but “they made sure to open a few days earlier so they could be ready for Valentine’s Day,” Cuomo said of the restaurant the Owners. “Guide the staff, bring supplies to the restaurants and that is a reasonable order.”
The decision appears to have been driven by restaurant owners and groups like the New York Hospitality Alliance. In a statement responding to Cuomo’s original January 25 announcement, NYHA’s Andrew Rigie said: “Restaurants are heartbroken because they have to wait two weeks until Valentine’s Day to open with just 25% occupancy” . (The covered dinner, as noted in the statement, was brought back from much of the state last month.)
Meanwhile, restaurant and bar staff are concerned that they will not be vaccinated before working indoors. Restaurant workers They were qualified for vaccination last week, but, as Cuomo himself said, the state’s vaccination program was hampered by supply problems, and in a few weeks, the state received 50,000 fewer doses than it expected 300,000. However, Cuomo noted last week that the federal government will soon increase supply by 20%.