The People Ignoring Social Distancing
Last weekend, hordes of Americans still turned out to dine and drink, the coronavirus be damned.
March 14 was a standard Saturday night for the weekend before St. Patrick’s Day: “Just a bunch of random people smashing Guinness,” said Andrew, a bartender who works at an “Irish-adjacent” bar in Washington, D.C. From 6 p.m. until last call at 2:30 a.m., Andrew witnessed hundreds of patrons—many of them just over 21—stream in, social distancing be damned. “They were out, and they didn’t really care,” he told me.
As the coronavirus pandemic has spread in the United States, public-health experts have lately been urging people—especially young people, many of whom —to limit their physical contacts with others, but Andrew described a raucous scene that seems out of step with this moment of worldwide panic and caution. “They knew
