Anyway. As we were about to start prepping to open on Monday, we got a call from somebody who said that they had been in our beer garden on Sunday, and that they (or somebody in their party, we're not 100% clear but also that's not an important detail) had recently tested positive for covid...
...they were seated at the table farthest from all the other tables. You know, the one that's way up in the corner on the patio and kinda bunched up over there (i.e. the one farthest from the stairs)? The "it's better than nothing" table? That one. Going from the notes we took and the information they gave us, it looks like it was a party of four that was there from about 2:30-3:30...
...once we found out what had happened, we called everybody who had been at the nearest table during/after their visit, as well as the people who sat at that table after them (several hours later, mind you). That ended up being a grand total of two or three parties (again, it's not our most sought-after table)...
...to be perfectly frank, we're confident enough in our safety measures that we don't believe anybody (staff or customers, excluding the other people at that table) would have been at risk. If you think about it, all of the safety protocols that we currently employ were put in place for exactly this reason. But since we like to get knowledge from knowledgeable people rather than our own conjecture, we sought opinions from somebody smarter than us (in this case, a doctor), who confirmed our suspicions that risk to others should be minimal (and who also pointed out that there are valid reasons why the customer in question might have had no reason to believe that they might be covid-positive)...
...but, since we pride ourselves on a) transparency, and 2) going overkill on sanitation/safety, we felt that it would be best to close for the day on Monday and scrub the everlovin' hell out of anything and everything in the beer garden/taproom (and also insist that everybody who had been working that day get tested). We also felt that it made sense to be as upfront as possible about why we closed for the day, since that's the kind of thing that we would want to know if roles were reversed...
...and then at some point we got a call from a reporter who had heard "all over social media" that we were "forced to close for the day," which was perhaps a smidge more dramatic than we would have liked (we closed voluntarily, and as far as we know we were the only ones talking about it on social media), but the article**** that they wrote didn't sensationalize the situation, so that's really neither here nor there...
...and now we're getting a bunch of weird emails from people saying things like "I heard all your employees got covid," which is pretty much the opposite of the truth and also not making this any easier for anyone.
** And third.
*** The first time it was the Boston Business Journal, who quoted us - at some length - making fun of the governor.
**** We still haven't seen the TV segment, but we're assuming that's also pretty straightforward. We weren't able to talk with the interviewer for that station, but that's probably in everybody's best interest, given our collective public speaking skill.