“I’m Terrified”: like the USA United States The reopening begins, the owner of a small business is preparing for an “uncertain” summer

He told a story from a recent day when a customer dodged clearly marked signs that his dining room was closed and tried to climb onto the table to retrieve the orders blocking the door. When he told her to stop, she asked, “How am I supposed to get in?”

This is what you can expect in the months to come, as Provincetown and the rest of the country open their doors to an audience hungry for a sense of normalcy.

“We have installed signs and painted X six feet from the ground to help people visualize the appropriate buffer zone,” he said. “But on weekends, things get difficult. As the queues get longer and the waits get longer, not everyone listens when we ask them to get away socially. “

If this Ozarks weekend streak is any indication, Anderson has reason to fear that his clients will ignore patterns of social alienation.

There were a lot of repercussions after the images of the weekend crowd spread on social networks:

The challenge for Anderson is to find the right path to follow.

“We are struggling to find the line between helping and harming our community, and we wonder how we will know if we cross it,” he said. “And we base our decisions on our own intuitions, with little official guidance from the authorities, of which we may need much more help.”

Anderson said that even before the summer rush, applying any kind of rule was difficult.

“The safety protocols that we had been dying had been difficult for our team to follow,” he said, noting one day that he had left his team to run the restaurant. “During our absence, the dining room was filled with hikers huddling around our separate tables. Our servers have reported that when trying to deliver food from a safe distance, some customers have confronted them. “

Clearly, not everyone is willing to follow the rules, as demonstrated by the Costco protesters
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it masks this requirement as a kind of violation of your rights.

“The limits of our power are too obvious,” said Anderson. “Once, when a guest waiting for their takeout order asked another to move a little so everyone could stand at an appropriate distance, the guest in the middle of it all just said” no “and stopped.” .

Lack of help from local authorities and the White House clouded the picture.

“Often when things get worse, the police in our town walked by, saw what was going on and said nothing. On paper, of course, it makes no sense. How can we expect to run a business and at the same time be the only ones implementing measures to keep society safe? he said. “But again, in light of the US government’s paralysis in the midst of this crisis, my team’s current dilemma makes sense in the world. “

Meanwhile, as the country and much of the world go ahead with plans to reopen, a prominent health expert warns that we are still at the center of the epidemic.

“Right now, we are not in the second wave. We are in the middle of the first wave in the world,” said Dr. Mike Ryan, executive director of the World Health Organization. “We are still in a phase where the disease is on the increase.”

Worldwide, the virus has infected 5.5 million people, killing an estimated 350,000 people, according to a count from Johns Hopkins University. The United States has claimed nearly 100,000 lives.