ST. MARYS, Ga. — With hundreds of coronavirus cases in our local Georgia counties, some restaurant owners are questioning if they feel comfortable opening up with restrictions.
Action News Jax Courtney Cole spoke to Louise Waldrop, the owner a local restaurant, who said she’s not quite sure if she’s opening on Monday.
Waldrop told Cole they’ve been doing a little less than half of the business they normally do at the restaurant.
So, she says business will be welcome, as long as it can be done safely.
"Our burgers: the Heart Stopper, the Freshman 15, those are some of the popular burgers,” Waldrop told Action News Jax.
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Since the dining room here at Red Moose has been closed because of coronavirus, Waldrop says folks have had to call in and carry out.
“People have been very respectful. They’ve been coming in, if someone’s in here they’ll walk out and wait for the most part,” said Waldrop.
On Monday, Georgia's governor is giving restaurants the opportunity to open, with limited dine-in service.
Waldrop said she needs to think about it over the weekend.
"I’m not even sure that I want to. I am very anxious about it, because staffing wise I don’t know what to do,” the owner said.
If she does decide to re-open on Monday, she says they'd take the same measures they did before the shelter-in-place order.
"We did every other table. And we did try to limit to about 50 people. And that was it. And then we asked them to wait, which everyone was great about. We have a pretty good size dining room, so we’re able to do that,” Waldrop said.
What she needs from the governor, in order to feel comfortable re-opening is more direction.
"Just tell us exactly what you want us to do. Don’t just say open up Monday, you’re free to open up Monday just do your social distancing. I feel like there needs to be specific guidelines to help,” Waldrop said.
Cole has been monitoring Gov. Kemp’s website throughout the day. No new executive orders or guidelines have been posted yet.
Cole also spoke to Dr. Saman Soleymani, the president and CEO of Avecina Medical, about the safety of Georgia’s decision to begin re-opening.
When he looked at the latest data from the Georgia Department of Public Health, here’s what he had to say:
"If you look at the Georgia Health Department, you’ll see that the peak numbers were around April 11, 12, or so … but mind you at the time that result comes out —that test was drawn five, seven days prior to that. You almost have to shift everything by a week over so we may be even further past the peak then with the numbers show,” said Dr. Soleymani.
This supports what Gov. Kemp told our sister station in Atlanta Tuesday, that data supports his decision.
“And mind you, those numbers, by the time they reported are already a week behind,” said Dr. Soleymani.
The doctor says this leads him to believe we could be closer to the light at the end of the tunnel than we think.
Dr. Soleymani says increasing access to testing should still be priority No. 1.
"I think testing needs to be done on a much more mass scale, to identify people that, particularly antibody testing to see if you had a past exposure and are immune into it,” Dr. Soleymani said.
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