With the city?s outdoor dining program set to end on October 31, New York needs a plan to keep diners and workers safe. | Spencer Platt/Getty Images

Nothing says health and safety like heavily armed city employees notorious for not wearing masks. For the past few months, New York City has permitted diners to spill out of restaurants and onto curbs, transforming streets into streateries as restaurants try to stay afloat. Winter is coming, however, and there?s only so much of the year when most New Yorkers can comfortably sit outdoors, even under tents and heat lamps.
But indoor dining is, clinically speaking, dangerous. Over the past six months, virologists have repeatedly demonstrated how efficiently COVID-19 leaps across tables when maskless people laugh and shout at each other over a pizza and a spicy Pinot; the diagrams showing the transmission patterns leading to disease clusters look like a maître d?s seating chart at your favorite neighborhood joint. Allowing diners to safely return to New York?s cheek-to-jowl dining rooms with the requisite six feet between them will require a delicate balance of logistics and technology, and heck of a lot of science. Rather than addressing indoor dining with the evidence-based approach he claims to be so fond of, Governor Andrew Cuomo has a better idea: cops. Lots of cops.

NEW: Cuomo says indoor dining *might* happen *if* NYC allocates a certain number of NYPD police to a taskforce to enforce social distancing

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