Business associations push back against Inslee’s closures

WENATCHEE — When Gov. Jay Inslee ordered the four-week closure of restaurants, bars, bowling alleys and gyms in mid-November in response to the state’s rising COVID-19 cases, a number of business owners and business associations started pushing back.

“The things that he just closed down, the bowling alleys, the bars, the restaurants, we’ve asked him to reconsider,” said Gary Chandler, a Moses Lake businessman, former state legislator, and the vice president of government affairs for the Association on Washington Business.

Inslee imposed the closure on Nov. 18, and it runs through Dec. 14. However, as Othello gym owner Janelle Anderson noted during a recent online meeting of the Othello City Council, few business owners believe the closure will actually be lifted until a vaccine is available sometime in the spring.

And there’s no way most small-business people can stay closed down that long, Anderson said.

Chandler said owners of businesses that are reliant on crowds want to see proof that their businesses, as opposed to large family gatherings like weddings and parties, are actually causing the spread of COVID-19.

“Just show us the data, because the data that I see, it’s not coming from our restaurants, it’s not coming from our bowling alleys or bars, where it’s really coming from is how people are socializing when they get home from work,” Chandler said.

Chandler said AWB staffers meet weekly with the governor’s office and state commerce department officials and are emphatic in communicating the concern that many small-business people — especially restaurant owners — have over even a temporary shutdown.

“I’m really fearful of this second shutdown, that a lot of them maybe they can’t come back. And I’d hate to see that happen,” he said.

Wenatchee gym owner Blair McHaney, who also owns MXM, a software company that makes an app to track workouts, helped found the Washington Fitness Alliance earlier this year to push for the use of real data and proper scientific methodology in assessing and dealing with the risk of COVID-19 transmission.

McHaney said the original hypothesis, that indoor spaces where a number of people congregate, like restaurants and gyms, were at high risk for spreading COVID-19, has not been borne out by the actual data.

“Of the COVID-19 cases in King County, there are zero outbreaks that can be traced back to fitness clubs,” he said. “Why is that?”

McHaney said it’s because of the rigorous precautions businesses owners have taken in order to reopen. In fact, he said that gym and fitness club owners have enacted very strict measures such as social distancing, stronger air filtering, mandating the wearing of face coverings except during actual workouts, and data keeping that allows gyms to do much more rigorous contact tracing because most gyms and fitness clubs track users.

McHenry said that rather than categorize businesses by their riskiness based on type, health officials should instead enforce certain kinds of standards for air quality, social distance between customers, face coverings and contact tracing that could be met by any business.

“Epidemiology does not tell us which business is safe,” he said, “but what controls you need to make businesses safe.”

Chandler believes the closure of restaurants is having an outsized effect on rural Washington, and believes — from personal experience — that making it harder to go out to eat or socialize in places with protections and controls is actually counterproductive.

“And I think it actually upsets people and they go socialize more, they do it in an area where it’s not protected,” he said. “You go to a restaurant, they have you spread out, they’re socially trying to distance people. If I can’t have that in a restaurant then I usually will gather with more people at my home.”

Chandler said he believes the pandemic is serious, and it’s important to limit the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus until a vaccine is available.

“Masks are very important, especially with this governor,” he said. “I really believe that when we’re out and about, we should be wearing a mask to protect myself as well as the person I’m coming in contact with.”

“We need to do everything we can until we get a vaccine, but I just do not believe in closing down our businesses, that that’s where the spread of this coming,” Chandler said.