LITTLE ROCK, Ark — Restaurants are working to navigate the newest curveball as employees test positive for COVID-19.
More and more restaurants are letting customers know about employees contracting COVID-19, and what they’re doing about it.
But, don’t expect every restaurant or bar to respond the same way.
“There’s not a blanket, you know, ‘this is what’s going to happen.’ The only thing that that’s going to happen, according to the directives, is that they need to notify us of the positive,” Environmental Supervisor for Retail Food Program Jeff Jackson said.
Once a case is reported to the ADH, it is dealt with on an individual basis.
“For one case you know, we’ll deal with that one case, but we’ll handle each individual restaurant case by case basis, depending on the severity of how many people were exposed and things of that nature,” Jackson said.
The owner of the food publication ‘Rock City Eats’ said a lot of restaurants choose to shut down because safety is huge in the eyes of the public.
Remaining open after reporting a positive case, even if not directed to close, can hurt business in the long run.
“So, it’s way more cost-effective just to go ahead and shut down for a couple days than it is to have that lingering problem, that lingering customer lack of safety that’s probably going to haunt them for a long time,” Greg Henderson said.
The manager of The Big Chill in Hot Springs says they haven’t had to handle a positive case amongst employees, but it is a fear.
“We still do the temperatures and we keep all that in place. We keep a log of that,” Brandon Scott said.
He said they’ve already decided shutting down will be their first step.
“I don’t think you can just have one of your employees infected and all of a sudden be like ‘oh, we’re just going to stay open,” Scott said.
The Arkansas Department of Health does not have numbers available on the number of restaurants that have reported positive cases at this time.