UPDATE: GREAT NEWS! Thank you, Mayor Wu!
Bostonians like to believe themselves advanced in the fight against COVID. We have one of the highest vaccination rates in the nation (71% for all ages in Massachusetts, compared with 59.5% nationally). We were early adopters of masks, for most, essentially voluntarily.
Yet as we enter the winter, it is striking to compare Boston’s COVID policies to other metropolitan areas. Consider, specifically, New York City.
Every inside venue in New York City has a vaccine mandate. That means that every restaurant or bar or cinema or theatre requires customers to prove that they are vaccinated. That requirement was of course made simpler by the state’s decision to enable vaccination passes. The Excelsior Pass is a mobile app available in New York to certify vaccination status or the results of a recent COVID test. With that app, it becomes easy for a venue to assure that customers are not creating an unnecessary risk to the venue’s employees — not to mention, other customers.
In Boston, by contrast, there is no vaccination requirement for indoor venues. And while reservation sites such as Opentable enable restaurants to indicate that proof of vaccination is required, apparently just one restaurant on that platform in the Boston area — Vee Vee in Jamaica Plain—has used that indication to help customers identify them as a COVID-safe restaurant. (State Park, Cambridge Common and Pagu in Cambridge (and Spoke Wine Bar in Somerville, thanks for the addition!) are two other restaurants that require proof of vaccination; they are not on the Opentable system, and the platform they do use — Resy — doesn’t give users the option of searching for vaccination requirements (which it clearly should, given 80% of the restaurants with mandates so far are on the Resy platform). (Update: I recently discovered the bar, The Quiet Few, and it makes the argument for proof powerfully.)
What this means is that as outdoor dining becomes impossible, residents of Boston will need to decide whether to accept the risk of unvaccinated customers — or simply stay home.
No doubt, the absurd decision by Governor Baker in April to quash any effort to enable vaccination card systems makes it more difficult for venues to implement vaccination requirements. (But see, from the better-late-than-never department, Massachusetts governor mulling vaccine passports for residents.) Yet whether or not a mandate for the state or city as a whole makes sense, certainly the city should encourage more restaurants to adopt voluntary requirements for their customers — at the very least, to better protect the employees in those restaurants and their families. COVID is still within the top ten causes of death among children in America today. And with Delta and Omicron, the pandemic in Boston is certainly not over: Boston’s per capital daily cases is 165% of New York’s. Our 14-day death rates have risen by 20% while New York’s has fallen by 10%. Those numbers of course are not driven by restaurant vaccination requirements, but they certainly highlight the need for indoor environments in Boston that better protect both workers and customers.
It is astonishing that we, as Americans, are as divided about this issue as we are. Yet it is even more astonishing that where we are not so divided, we still have governments slow to push for practices that increase safety. There are still many who cannot protect themselves against COVID, either because they are too young for the vaccine or remain immunocompromised. There are many front-line workers who face a constant risk of either contracting the disease or passing it to others. Boston should do better to encourage businesses to protect their workers, and their customers, if not through mandates, then at the very least through clearer indications of where COVID safety is taken seriously. Maybe we don’t need to become New York. But at the very least, we should be able to be as smart as New York, at least for those who so choose.
