A restaurant owner in California, where many businesses were recently closed again to mitigate the spread of the coronavirus, told Fox News that the past four months have been “difficult to deal with.”
“The biggest challenge has been just the inconsistency and not really knowing what the next week is going to look like,” Waterfront Bar & Grill owner Chad Cline told “Fox & Friends First” on Wednesday. “And it is very difficult to operate a business when you don’t really understand how you’re going to deliver to the market a product that they can find valuable,” he said.
Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, announced during a press briefing on Monday that all bars across the state must close up shop and that restaurants, wineries, tasting rooms, family entertainment centers, zoos, museums and card rooms must suspend indoor activities.
The governor also announced that all gyms, places of worship, malls, personal care services, barbershops, salons and non-critical offices in counties on the state’s “monitoring list” had to shut down under the new order. The order affects more than 30 counties, which are home to about 80 percent of California’s population.
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“We’ve made this point on multiple occasions and that is, we’re moving back into a modification mode of our original stay-at-home order,” Newsom said during his press briefing. “This continues to be a deadly disease.”
As of Monday, the state had reported more than 320,000 COVID-19 cases and more than 7,000 deaths, with 23 people dying from the virus since Sunday. Los Angeles County – the country’s most populous county – leads both the state and the country in number of confirmed COVID-19 cases with more than 133,000, according to the Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins University.
In March, California became the first state to impose a mandatory stay-at-home order to slow the spread of the virus. Public health officials praised the state’s quick action, marveling at how the nation’s most populous state kept its cases and hospitalizations low while states like New York and New Jersey struggled to contain the highly contagious disease.
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Cline said that America should be paying attention to the “casualty rate” of businesses while there is no financial support from the government.
“I think Americans can do better than a 30-50 percent casualty rate. I think it’d be nice to get our casualty rate down to the single digits if that was even possible. The only way that is going to happen is if there is some sort of financial assistance that helps with some of the losses,” Cline said.
“I don’t think that small business owners are asking for income or to make them a little relative to 2019, I think we’re just asking for survival,” he said. “I honestly think that is a fair ask.”
