In the recent elections in India, voters faced a dizzying choice between candidates and political parties.
Around the world, voters appear to be turning away from traditional political organisations, but can democracy survive without them?
From Knowable Magazine
In 1796, President George Washington lambasted political parties for allowing “cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men” to “subvert the power of the people”.
His indictment seems brutally timely today, just a few months after 147 Republican US congress members publicly challenged results of the most recent US presidential election. But even long before then, many Americans shared Washington’s concern.
The popularity of parties is at a nadir, with both the Democratic and Republican parties in the US widely condemned as not only unrepresentative but also hijacked by elites. Indeed, a steadily increasing share of US voters – 38% in 2018 – identify as unaffiliated with either party. That proportion is now larger than the share of voters identifying with either Republicans or Democrats.
It seems to be an international phenomenon. In Europe, for example, traditionally powerful centre-left parties are being accused of ignoring their voters, potentially contributing to a backlash that helped push the United Kingdom into Brexit.
The mounting animosity toward the parties has inspired debate among political scientists. Defenders of the traditional party system contend that democracy depends on strong, organised and trustworthy political factions. “People in politics often try to go around parties, to go directly to the people. But without the parties, we’d have chaos,” says Harvard University political scientist Nancy Rosenblum, who explores the challenges facing political parties today.
Yet a small group of scholars, many of them young, say it’s time to start visualising a more open and direct democracy, with less mediation by parties and professional politicians. Such proposals were seen as “completely fringe” until a decade ago, says Hélène Landemore, a political scientist at Yale University. But events including the 2008 economic crisis and Donald Trump’s 2016 election as president, she says, have enlarged the scope of debate.
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The choice between candidates and the political parties they represent has become a defining feature of most democratic elections (Credit: Yasuyoshi Chiba/AFP/Getty Images)
Several trends have sped the declining popularity and power of the parties in the United States. Party-run patronage schemes that rewarded supporters with government jobs have long given way to more meritocratic systems. The rise of independent political action committees has given candidates a source of campaign funding — around $4.5bn (£3.17bn) in the last decade – outside the party channels that once dominated access to campaign money. This has made many candidates more entrepreneurial and less beholden to the party bureaucracy.
Thirdly, parties now determine their candidates through primary elections instead of with meetings of party insiders. Just 17 primaries were held in 1968 – today every state has a primary or caucus. This switch to universal primaries has shifted influence from party veterans to more extreme activists, who are more likely than average voters to vote in primaries, says Ian Shapiro, a political scientist at Yale. In 2018, the Democratic National Committee even cut back on the influence of superdelegates, the hundreds of party VIPs who also had votes in selecting candidates. This was to reassure voters that party officials were listening to them, the DNC’s vice-chair said at the time.
In many parts of the United States, partisan gerrymandering has contributed to making candidates less representative of their constituents by creating “safe seats” for both parties. That means that the winners are, in effect, decided in the primaries that pit Democrats against Democrats and Republicans against Republicans. This phenomenon helps explain the 2018 election of Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, then a 28-year-old democratic socialist who had never before held elected office, says Shapiro. Ocasio-Cortez beat an establishment Democrat in a primary in which less than 12% of voters turned out.
Not everyone agrees that political parties are weaker today than they once were. Today’s extreme polarisation means that much of the public is more strongly attached to their own party, says Rosenblum, and party-led voter suppression or voter mobilisation efforts in fact make party leaders more powerful than ever.
Parties serve many other important roles, including facilitating compromise, says Russell Muirhead, a political scientist at Dartmouth University
Still, Shapiro and many other experts believe political parties have suffered a major loss in clout, which in turn has been a loss for democracy in general.
“Political parties are the core institution of democratic accountability because parties, not the individuals who support or comprise them, can offer competing visions of the public good,” write Shapiro and his Yale colleague, Frances Rosenbluth, in a 2018 opinion piece. Voters, they argue, have neither the time nor the background to research costs and benefits of policies and weigh their personal interests against what’s best for the majority in the long run.
To show what can go wrong with single-issue voting that lacks party guidance, Shapiro and Rosenbluth point to California’s notorious Proposition 13, a 1978 ballot initiative that sharply restricted increases in property taxes. At first, the measure seemed like a win to many voters. Yet over the years, the new rule also decimated local budgets to the point where California’s per-pupil school spending now ranks near the bottom of a list of the 50 states.
Parties serve many other important roles, including facilitating compromise, says Russell Muirhead, a political scientist at Dartmouth University and Rosenblum’s co-author. As an example, Muirhead points to the US Farm Bill, which the two parties renegotiate roughly every five years. Each time they sit down, “the Democrats want food support for urban people and Republicans want support for farmers, and somehow, they always come to an agreement,” Muirhead says. “The alternative is favouring one side or simply passing nothing at all.”
Perhaps most important, the US’s two main parties have traditionally cooperated in acknowledging their opponents’ legitimacy, as Rosenblum and Muirhead write. Other nations, such as Thailand, Turkey and Germany, have banned political parties that their governments have seen as too destabilising to democracy. American parties’ cooperation has helped keep the peace by reassuring US voters that even if they lose today, they may well win tomorrow. Now, however, this fundamental rule is being broken, say Rosenblum, Muirhead and others, with some party leaders even accusing their opponents of treason.
Despite the tense and often combative party politics in many countries, political parties also find room for compromise and work together (Credit: Bill Greenblatt/Getty Images)
“The key thing going on now is that we have an explicit argument that the opposition party is illegitimate,” says Rosenblum. “Trump has been calling the Democrats the enemy of the people and illegitimate, and saying the election is fraudulent. This is the path to violence, as there’s no way to correct this with another election.”
Political parties throughout the world have lost considerable goodwill and influence, says Shapiro, yet he suggests that rather than ban them or further sap their power we must strengthen them and make them more reliable. He and his colleagues advocate reforming campaign financing, to eliminate the currently chaotic bidding wars for candidates’ loyalties, although that goal continues to be elusive. To combat the rise in extremism, they also urge that the job of redistricting go to nonpartisan commissions instead of gerrymandering.
To further reduce the risk of primaries increasing polarisation, Shapiro proposes that party leaders be allowed to choose candidates if the turnout in a primary election has fallen below 75% of the turnout in the previous general election.
Landemore and her faction contend these ideas don’t match the urgency of the current dilemma. She invites people to imagine how democracy might function with less or even zero reliance on political parties and particularly without costly and potentially corrupting political campaigns. One possibility, she says, would be to randomly appoint groups of citizens, chosen much as today’s juries are, to lead government, while rotating in fixed terms through a permanent “House of the People”. These citizens’ assemblies would be more representative than the current US Congress, wrote Rutgers University philosopher Alexander Guerrero in a 2019 opinion piece, in which he advocated choosing representatives by lottery.
Several European nations have already tried alternatives to party-driven democracy
“In the United States, 140 of the 535 people serving in Congress have a net worth over $2m (£1.4m), 78% are male, 83% are white, and more than 50% were previously lawyers or businesspeople,” he wrote.
Several European nations have already tried alternatives to party-driven democracy. In 2019-20, France held a Citizens’ Convention on Climate, calling on 150 randomly chosen citizens to help devise socially just ways to reduce greenhouse gases. In December 2020, the French President agreed to hold a referendum on one of the convention’s suggestions, the inclusion of climate protection in the national constitution.
And in 2016, the Irish Parliament assembled 99 citizens to deliberate on stubborn issues, including a constitutional ban on abortion. A majority of the assembly proposed that the ban be struck down, after which a national referendum confirmed the result and changed the law – all accomplished without involvement of established political parties.
Despite the limited impact of these efforts to date, Landemore says the tide of public opinion is turning. Just five years ago, colleagues mocked the notion of an “open democracy” at a political science conference, she says, adding: “Five years from now I’m guessing we’ll be completely mainstream.”
Studies show that moments of disruption offer a unique opportunity to set and achieve new goals.
Tara Parker-Pope, New York Times
If there was ever a perfect time to make a life change, this is it.
Behavioral scientists have long known that times of disruption and transition also create new opportunities for growth and change. Disruption can come in many forms, and it happens when life knocks us out of our normal routines. It can be moving to a new city, starting a new job, getting married or divorced or having a child. And for many of us, there’s never been a bigger life disruption than the pandemic, which changed how we work, eat, sleep and exercise, and even how we connect with friends and family.
“I think this fresh start is really a big opportunity,” said Katy Milkman, a professor at the Wharton School and author of the new book “How to Change: The Science of Getting From Where You Are to Where You Want to Be. “I don’t know when we’ll have another one like it. We have this blank slate to work on. Everything is on the table to start fresh.”
Much of Dr. Milkman’s research has focused on the science of new beginnings, which she calls “the fresh start effect.” Dr. Milkman and her colleagues have found that we’re most inclined to make meaningful changes around “temporal landmarks” — those points in time that we naturally associate with a new beginning. New Year’s Day is the most obvious temporal landmark in our lives, but birthdays, the start of spring, the start of a new school year, even the beginning of the week or the first of the month are all temporal landmarks that create psychological opportunities for change.
In one study, Dr. Milkman found that students were most likely to visit the gym around the start of the week, the first of the month, following birthdays or after school breaks. Another study found that “fresh start language” helped people kick-start their goals. In that study, people were far more likely to start a new goal on a day labeled “the first day of spring” compared to an unremarkable day labeled “the third Thursday in March.” (It was the exact same day, just labeled differently.)
Another study found that when people were advised to start saving money in a few months, they were less likely to do so than a group of people told to start saving around their birthday that was also a few months away. The birthday group saved 20 to 30 percent more money.
Although the pandemic is far from over, for many people, the lifting of restrictions and getting vaccinated means planning vacations and returning to more-normal work and school routines. It’s exactly the kind of psychological new beginning that could prompt the fresh start effect, said Dr. Milkman.
“We have this opportunity with this blank slate to change our health habits and be very conscientious about our day,” said Dr. Milkman. “What is our lunch routine going to look like? What is our exercise routine? There’s an opportunity to rethink. What do we want a work day to look like?”
It’s Not Too Late to Reset.
As the pandemic recedes, some people are worried that the past year of lockdowns, restrictions and time at home was a missed opportunity. Leslie Scott, a nonprofit event organizer in Eugene, Ore., said she feels that she just muddled through a stressful year, rather than using the time to make meaningful life changes.
“I sometimes wonder if I squandered this gift of time,” said Ms. Scott, who is an organizer of the Oregon Truffle Festival. “I have all this anxiety that we’re just going to go back to what people think of as normal. As we come out of our cocoons, am I emerging from something and moving toward something new? Or am I just stuck?”
While some people did develop healthy new habits during pandemic lockdowns, it’s not too late if you spent your pandemic days just getting by. The good news is that the end of the pandemic is probably a more opportune time for meaningful change than when you were experiencing the heightened anxiety of lockdowns.
“Covid-19 was an awful time for many of us,” said Laurie Santos, a psychology professor at Yale who teaches a popular online course called “The Science of Well-Being.” “There’s lots of evidence for what’s called post-traumatic growth — that we can come out stronger and with a bit more meaning in our lives after going through negative events. I think we can all harness this awful pandemic time as a time to get some post-traumatic growth in our own lives.”
So What’s Your Next Chapter?
One of the biggest obstacles to change has always been the fact that we tend to have established routines that are hard to break. But the pandemic shattered many people’s routines, setting us up for a reset, Dr. Santos said.
“We’ve all just changed our routines so much,” she said. “I think many of us have realized during the pandemic that some of the things we were doing before Covid-19 weren’t the kind of things that were leading to flourishing in our lives. I think many of us were realizing that aspects of our work and family life and even our relationships probably need to change if we want to be happier.”
One reason fresh starts can be so effective is that humans tend to think about the passage of time in chapters or episodes, rather than on a continuum, Dr. Milkman said. As a result, we tend to think of the past in terms of unique periods, such as our high school years, the college years, the years we lived in a particular town or worked at a certain job. Going forward, we’re likely to look back on the pandemic year as a similarly unique chapter of our lives.
“We have chapter breaks, as if life is a novel — that is the way we mark time,” said Dr. Milkman. “That has implications for the psychology of fresh starts, because these moments that open a new chapter give us a sense of a new beginning. It’s easier to attribute any failings to ‘the old me.’ You feel like you can achieve more now, because we’re in a new chapter.”
Take the Fresh Start Challenge!
While the start of a new chapter is a great time for change, the pages will turn quickly. Now that we’re emerging from the restrictions of pandemic life, social scientists say it’s an ideal time to start thinking about what you’ve learned in the past year. What are the new habits you want to keep, and what parts of your prepandemic life do you want to change?
“It’s time to rethink your priorities,” said Dr. Milkman, who outlines more detailed steps for change in her new book. “We have to ask ourselves, ‘How am I going to schedule my time?’ We have a limited window to be deliberate about it, because pretty quickly, we’ll have a new pattern established, and we probably won’t rethink it again for a while.”
A good first step is to take our 10-Day Fresh Start Challenge. Each challenge will prompt moments of mindful reflection, help you build stronger connections and offer small steps toward building healthy new habits. You can find all 10 installments on The Fresh Start Challenge page.
“I think a lot of us have realized how fragile some of the things were that gave us joy before, from going to the grocery store, to going out to a restaurant with friends, going to a movie, giving your mom a hug whenever you’d like,” said Dr. Santos. “My hope is that we’ll emerge from this pandemic with a bit more appreciation for the little things in life.”
As we have seen over the last year, perceptions of the Coronavirus/Covid lethality, the risks of contraction, and the vaccines available to contain it, vary among the population. The response has been predictably wide. Ranging from thoughtful and informed behavior from many states and communities country-wide, to outright flouting of any responsible behavior. Whether based on blind denial or blunt philosophical frankness in rejecting any unwanted lifestyle or behavioral modification.
The consequences from the latter group’s behavior have been clear and on display from the start of the Covid pandemic last Spring. It no longer matters how or why the net response to the pandemic became so fragmented and fractured instead of unified in battle. What matters now is that we all get on board now together unified against this thing. If we do not, it will spin out of control…again. More people will get sick…again. More people will die…again. Lockdowns will come back…again. Business will suffer and go down…again. People will argue and blame each other…again. The only thing possibly different this time around is that all of the above will be worse.
Because of the second group’s behavior above, along with worldwide breakdowns in political structures, public trust, information guidance, and inadequate health systems, the Coronavirus has infected far more people than it could have, and in the process, has mutated into more dangerous variants of the original strain that can escape vaccination defenses.
In particular, the South African variant, aka B.1.351, and the Brazilian variant, aka P.1, are concerning to all virologists and medical professionals. There are now reports these strains have infected previously vaccinated people and caused illness. Both of these variants are already in the U.S. in numbers enough to grow exponentially if they are not contained in the very near future.
BUT, there IS good news. It does NOT have to be this way. We have the power to prevent this from happening. It comes from medicine. It comes from informed and responsible behavior.
There is one way to fight the growth of mutated variants and thus, any virus. Stop infection transmission in the population with vaccines.
If you don’t want to get the vaccine, and you’re okay constantly wearing a mask, staying distant from everyone, being anxious every time you leave the house, and segregating from virtually everyone outside your home bubble, not being able to travel, for possibly ever, then stand your ground, and don’t get the vaccine. Maybe you’ll wait out the herd immunity thing (80% vaccination) hoping it’ll happen soon enough, and you’ll just get the benefits from everyone else’s immunity. You’ll then be part of the illustrious group tagged “Free Riders.” Not too flattering.
I’m not scared of medicine. I’m thankful of it. I’m thankful there are smart enough people in science and medicine that have confidence and skill to treat my ailments and those around me for years. It’s illness I have a problem with. Covid is a tough adversary. It caught us short sighted and required an EUA vaccine to help us fight it. That’s not something anyone I know has been through before. It’s understandable to be skittish. It’s normal.
We’ve been here before. Humanity has been here before. The global timeline of health, illness, disease, treatments, medicine, vaccines, and recovery are long and rich enough in detailed history to give us all perspective. In most ways, medicine is so far advanced today that it almost isn’t meant to be understood by patients. Not unless you want to study genome sequencing and DNA up close. No. What ultimately matters is trust. You either trust medicine and your health providers, or you do not. If you’re already receiving medical care, you’ve decided to trust the doctors.This doesn’t mean you don’t have a right to be anxious or scared. That’s called being normal. But trust is a conscious, necessary decision to make. If you trust medicine, and doctors (in general) you have to trust the EUA vaccine. Get it done. Help us fight this damn thing, or, just stop going to the doctor altogether. You can’t have it both ways.
If you’ve been vaccinated. You’ve already taken a crucial step to helping all of us out of this muck and mire. The vaccine, however, is not an automatic ticket to freedom and normalcy. Many states have opened up businesses and relaxed restaurant and congregant capacity guidelines as infection rates have dropped. But (again another “BUT”), the political and commercial pressure on state governors is tremendous. It’s not right that these factors are playing a role in public health decisions, but unfortunately that is reality. This is why it is incumbent on all of us to not look to political leaders for guidance on our personal decisions going forward from this pandemic. It is naiive and dangerous to do so. The people to look to for clues and cues on what to do and how we should do it after vaccinations are medical and health professionals who have no political ties.
Beyond that, don’t push aside your own deductive reasoning and common sense for assessing risk just because you can’t wait to go out with friends, jump on a plane, get a facial, a massage, or go to a gym. It doesn’t work that way.
You may not like math, but the math here is simple. Take a few measly minutes and look at what’s happening with the variant trend in your state. There are some good interviews available with medical people. There are articles, columns, op-eds, easy to read graphs and charts. There is plenty of good info out there. There is no excuse to not be informed with credible health and safety guidance about what’s going on. Whether it’s deciding on the vaccine, or how to act after you’ve gotten the vaccine. Like anything worthwhile learning, or understanding. It takes your time. It takes your effort. Give both to learn and understand.
I don’t use the term lightly. It sounds harsh because it is harsh. I confess there’s something about avoiding premature, preventable death that brings out the judgement in me.
Its a shame that differing opinions on protecting ourselves from Covid continues on a similarly divisive track that politics has for the last several years. I do not speak entirely for the camps on both sides here. There are always odd exceptions of mixed breeds among us, but as far as I can tell so far, a sizable amount of Conservative and Trumper sympathies are also very gung-ho about going back to eating INSIDE restaurants, gathering among groups of vaccinated or non-vaccinated, and cheerfully eager to drop their masks and make believe things are normal again. The problem is, things are not normal, and saying they are doesn’t make it so. Nor does a politically pressured state governor have a right to say it is by rolling back restrictions or lockdowns. If anyone doesn’t realize the political pressure put on state Governors right now, in spite of medical evidence urging caution, they are burying their heads, or don’t know politics. Again, see above post title.
It’s one thing trying to analyze certain (mostly Florida?) spring breakers, who by ritual indoctrination, get possessed to risk any and every thing for the sake of boozing themselves to unconsciousness, having sex with anyone who looks sideways at them, to proving they know how to define a party at any cost. Its quite another thing to observe the adults doing something that is, while much quieter, also risky.
There are people taking the reopening edicts and their holstered vaccines as a racehorse does at the track when the steel gate flies open for them. “And they’re off!” They can’t wait to do something normal, and they go for it when the first authority figure gives their permission. The problem is, there should only be one type of authority figure here to guide us, Health and medical authority figures. No businessman. No friend or family members. And definitely, no politician.
If you want to know the risk for Covid right now outside a household or controlled bubble, the answer is not radically different than it was six months ago. This goes even if you’ve already been vaccinated. Read it again. It goes even if you’re vaccinated. For some reason, there is a real tone deafness among the populous that doesn’t seem able to understand the language and word choices coming from every public health official, virologist, and virtually all medical professionals right now. For some reason, there is a deafness in the populous to the warnings of the threats of the emerging and established variants.
I get the fatigue. But we’ve come a long way to get here. What’s the rush now? Why is it so necessary to lunge back into the fray while we’re still in the hot middle of this mess? The sun can and will come out. We can not blow the clouds away before they’re ready to blow away. There is still a serious viral overcast. Why is it so imperative right now to open and run into the restaurant where many servers and others remain unvaccinated.
There is no free ticket to immunity here. Even with the vaccines. The variants have already shown concerning resistance. People have gotten reinfected with and without vaccines. There are people with good immune systems who have gotten infected, gone on ventilators, and died. There are many explainable deaths and sickness from Covid. There are also plenty of unexplainable deaths and sickness. Try reading some of those stories, instead of just talking about the elderly and infirm nursing homes victims.
Listen to the national health spokespeople and professional medical consensus, and then blend it with some common sense. Sure this is all hard. It’s been a year. I choose to look at things from the other side. Its actually not been that long a time. And it actually is quite easy.
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“You have decreases in cases and deaths when you wear masks, and you have increases in cases and deaths when you have in-person restaurant dining,” Dr. Rochelle P. Walensky, the director of the C.D.C., said on Friday.
Daily infections rose about six weeks after counties allowed restaurants to open for dining on the premises, and death rates followed two months later.
Even if restaurants limit capacity, however, aerosolized virus may accumulate if ventilation is inadequate, Dr. Allen said.
“It doesn’t really matter if it’s a restaurant, spin class, a gym, a choir practice — if you’re indoors with no masks, or no ventilation, we know that’s higher risk,” he said. “Respiratory aerosols build up indoors. It’s that simple. This is a real problem for restaurants.”
The Virus Spread Where Restaurants Reopened or Mask Mandates Were Absent
C.D.C. researchers found that coronavirus infections and death rates rose in U.S. counties permitting in-person dining or not requiring masks.
“You have decreases in cases and deaths when you wear masks, and you have increases in cases and deaths when you have in-person restaurant dining,” Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the C.D.C. director, said Friday.Credit…Ringo H.W. Chiu/Associated Press
Federal researchers also found that counties opening restaurantsfor on-premises dining — indoors or outdoors — saw a rise in daily infections about six weeks later, and an increase in Covid-19 death rates about two months later.
The study does not prove cause and effect, but the findings square with other research showing that masks prevent infection and that indoor spaces foster the spread of the virus through aerosols, tiny respiratory particles that linger in the air.
“You have decreases in cases and deaths when you wear masks, and you have increases in cases and deaths when you have in-person restaurant dining,” Dr. Rochelle P. Walensky, the director of the C.D.C., said on Friday. “And so we would advocate for policies, certainly while we’re at this plateau of a high number of cases, that would listen to that public health science.”
On Friday night, the National Restaurant Association, which represents one million restaurants and food service outlets, criticized the C.D.C. study as “an ill-informed attack on the industry hardest-hit by the pandemic.” It pointed out that researchers had not controlled for factors other than restaurant dining — such as business closures and other policies — that might have contributed to coronavirus infections and deaths.
“If a positive correlation between ice cream sales and shark attacks is found, that would not mean that ice cream causes shark attacks,” the association said in a statement.
The group also faulted federal researchers for not measuring compliance with safe operating protocols, and it noted that the research did not distinguish between indoor dining or outdoor dining, nor whether restaurants had adhered to distancing recommendations or had adequate ventilation.
“It is irresponsible to pin the spread of Covid-19 on a single industry,” the association said.
The findings come as city and state officials nationwide grapple with growing pressure to reopen schools and businesses amid falling rates of new cases and deaths. Officials have recently permitted limited indoor dining in New York City. On Thursday, Connecticut’s governor said the state would be ending capacity limits later this month on restaurants, gyms and offices. Masks are still required in both locales.
“The study is not surprising,” said Joseph Allen, an associate professor at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health and director of the university’s Healthy Buildings program. “What’s surprising is that we see some states ignoring all of the evidence and opening up quickly, and removing mask mandates and opening full dining.”
Other researchers said the new study confirmed the idea that viral transmission often takes place through the air, that physical distancing may not be sufficient to halt the spread in some settings, and that masks at least partly block airborne particles.
President Biden’s health advisers have said in recent days that now is not the time to relax. As of Thursday, the seven-day average of new cases was still 62,924 a day, according to a database maintained by The New York Times.
Mr. Biden on Wednesday criticized the decisions by the governors of Texas and Mississippi to lift statewide mask mandates and reopen businesses without restrictions, calling the plans “a big mistake” that reflected “Neanderthal thinking.”
The president, who has asked Americans to wear masks during his first 100 days in office, said it was critical for public officials to follow the guidance of doctors and public health leaders as the coronavirus vaccination campaign gains momentum. As of Thursday, about 54 million people had received at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine.
“It may seem tempting, in the face of all of this progress, to try to rush back to normalcy as if the virus is in the rearview mirror,” Andy Slavitt, a White House adviser on the pandemic, said on Friday. “It’s not.”
Diners in San Antonio on Wednesday. Credit…Eric Gay/Associated Press
C.D.C. researchers examined the associations between mask mandates, indoor or outdoor restaurant dining, and coronavirus infections and deaths last year between March 1 and Dec. 31. The agency relied on county-level data from state government websites and measured daily percentage change in coronavirus cases and deaths.
Infections and deaths declined after counties mandated mask use, the agency found. Daily infections rose about six weeks after counties allowed restaurants to open for dining on the premises, and death rates followed two months later.
The report’s authors concluded that mask mandates were linked to statistically significant decreases in coronavirus cases and death rates within 20 days of implementation. On-premises dining at restaurants, indoors or outdoors, was associated with rising case and death rates 41 to 80 days after reopenings.
“State mask mandates and prohibiting on-premises dining at restaurants help limit potential exposure to SARS-CoV-2, reducing community transmission of Covid-19,” the authors wrote.
Shortly after publishing the report, the C.D.C. amended it, urging establishments that resume serving diners to follow agency guidelines for reducing transmission in restaurants.
“The message is, if restaurants are going to open for on-premise dining, it’s important to follow C.D.C. guidelines to do so safely and effectively,” said Gery P. Guy, a scientist with the C.D.C.’s Covid response team and the study’s corresponding author.
That includes “everything from having staff stay home when they show signs of Covid or have tested positive or been in contact with someone who has Covid, and requiring masks among employees as well as customers who are not actively eating or drinking,” Dr. Guy said.
Other steps include adequate ventilation, options to eat outdoors, spacing customers six feet apart, encouraging frequent hand washing, and sanitizing of surfaces that are touched a lot, such as cash registers or pay terminals, door handles and tables.
Even if restaurants limit capacity, however, aerosolized virus may accumulate if ventilation is inadequate, Dr. Allen said.
“It doesn’t really matter if it’s a restaurant, spin class, a gym, a choir practice — if you’re indoors with no masks, low or no ventilation, we know that’s higher risk,” he said. “Respiratory aerosols build up indoors. It’s that simple. This is a real problem for restaurants.”
Linsey Marr, an expert on aerosol transmission at Virginia Tech, said Americans could not be expected to follow all the latest science, and so many simply rely on what is open or closed as an indicator of what is safe.
But indoor dining is particularly risky, she added. People typically sit in a restaurant for an hour or more and don’t wear masks while eating, leaving them vulnerable to airborne virus.
“Limiting capacity will help reduce the risk of transmission, but indoor dining is still a high-risk activity until more people are vaccinated,” she said.
Restaurant workers are particularly exposed. While they can wear masks, diners do not, reducing protection against the virus. And workers spend many hours inside with every shift, Dr. Allen said.
He recommended that restaurant workers double-mask, wearing a surgical mask covered by a cloth mask, or buy high-efficiency masks like N95s, typically reserved for health care workers, or KN95 or KF94 masks, taking steps to assure they are not counterfeit.
“Now is not the time to let our guard down and pull back on the controls when we’re so close to having a lot of people vaccinated,” Dr. Allen said.
