RedSun

This does not make any sense at all.

If Trump stays at the same resort as I do. He stops by the buffet stand and speaks with his best friends, without mask of course. Do you want to eat the food near where Trump stands? No way. This is how Puritan throws away the coronavirus test swabs during Trump Maine factory visit.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/...bs/3153622001/

You just do not know what people do with our food....

RedSun

As we all know, the pandemic situation is very fluid. Certainly it changes week by week, day by day. If you book a hotel stay 2-3 months ahead, hotels would not know what level of services they will offer or re-instate.

I just suggest we use common sense with our travel. Our expectation should meet the reality.

fliesdelta

Buffets are gross, and I’ve never seen one where everyone follows the “simple safeguards” of which you speak. There’s always some, or many, who reuse plates, get their hands on the food, etc. Besides, how do you propose those simple measures to be enforced? If even a single person breaks the rules then they have to stop the line, replace a lot of the food, etc.?

cruisr

I called a Courtyard I have stayed in before and plan on visiting in two weeks, and asked if their bistro is open and if they are still offering the $10.00 pp for Platinum guests. The answer to both questions was: yes. i chatted with the front desk person who answered the phone and she said they were running at about 40% occupancy. I have been calling the hotels directly to find out what they have suspended, if anything.

bocastephen

Let's try this again - you CANNOT get coronavirus from eating contaminated food. Ever. Never. It's never, ever going to happen. You can only get coronavirus at a buffet from 1) being close to an infected person and breathing their infected droplets, which is mitigated by wearing a mask and practicing safe distance, or 2) touching a contaminated serving utensil and then touching you nose, eyes, mouth or another virus entry point, again, mitigated by using a food service glove or wrapping a napkin around the handle.

Be realistic, buffets ARE coming back, they are already are back in many APAC hotels, and they will be back in airline lounges, western hotels and Las Vegas for sure.

Well suit yourself, just don't go to a buffet - they are fine for many other people with proper food safety practices, which have already been in place as part of the law for many years before coronavirus. I've had staff throw unclean offenders out of various airline and hotel lounges over the years for unsanitary practices, and I've sent health inspectors into other lounges for surprises inspections and citations for these issues. If everyone is willing to be a little vigilant and call out the people who don't care and humiliate them in public, the bad behavior will subside. I have zero tolerance for hands on food, and have yelled at people in public for doing this. Coronavirus is not really the concern, it's norovirus who is your enemy at the buffet, because it CAN be transmitted through food and I've spent one too many nights in the hospital connected to an IV because of a norovirus attack brought on by some jackass at a buffet or other public place spreading that virus.

RedSun

It is up the guests to decide if they want buffet food. You are not the doctor to tell people how people get the virus etc. Some people say you CANNOT get coronavirus for sitting on the same toilet seat etc.... Even it is only 1% chance, hotel and we do not want to take chance. There is still a lot of myth about this virus.

Flying for Fun

And the broken record skips one more time!

Are you an epidemiologist? If you keep making the same claim over and over is it supposed to make fiction, fact?

If I spit on your food..... you didn't follow that last time. Lets try this! If a contaminated utensil is used to serve some food contaminating that food and you eat the contaminated food how is it possible that you cannot get Coronavirus from eating that food, ever, never? Please show me the links and data supporting your claim. Until then it may behoove you to refrain from providing "expert" advise that others may rely on. People have died listening to a Leader.

Thank you,

James

TSTraveler

While I completely disagree with @bocastephen regarding buffets and their risks, he is not incorrect in that there is no evidence of any food-born transmission of the covid19 virus.

As per the CDC: https://www.cdc.gov/foodsafety/newsl...ronavirus.html

This statement is reinforced by similar statements by the WHO and every major national public health agency, every medical association, medical school, etc. The risk is not in the food being served. And as stated above, as well, the risk on the surfaces of the serving utensils and other dishware associated with buffets actually may be quite low, too.

This is why he likely believes buffets are safe. And if buffets operated in a vacuum with multiple persons at or around them, they might be. But they never operate in a vacuum!

That being said, I still believe (as do most of the same public health experts and authorities from all of the same sources above) that hotel and lounge buffets will be a very risky proposition for covid19 transmission due to the extremely unlikely enforcement and practicing of social distancing in their execution and delivery by the individuals serving and/or using them. When people gather in proximity, people run the risk of the same airborn transmission that we know is risky. Buffets almost never will be properly designed and executed such that the distances required to get to the buffet, get served, and exit are safe and with social distances observed. People might be smart, but groups of people are quite dumb.

We already see people violating social distance rules in any number of scenarios. If you feel comfortable to use a buffet, then by all means feel free to do so. Plenty of people even now in the USA feel comfortable doing all sorts of things without observing social distancing--and many of those will run the risk of contracting the virus and unknowingly spreading it, as well. I won't be one of those!

bocastephen

True, some buffets may never come back because of their design, but others just need small changes in layout and staff - for example, one way in and one way out, with staff enforcing limited access at the front of the buffet to keep people sufficiently apart. It shouldn't be an all-or-nothing proposition.

RedSun

It is not really if we can get coronavirus from food or not. It is guests' comfort level. Even if buffet food comes back, hotels still need to provide other alternatives for the guests who are not comfortable with buffet food. There is no point for the hotel to incur any kind of liability due to coronavirus.....

bocastephen

Most hotels already provide an a la carte menu for guests, so someone who does not want the buffet can either order from the menu and pay accordingly, or the hotel could offer an a la carte American or Continental breakfast from the kitchen. I imagine most reasonable hotels will offer a plated breakfast from the kitchen if requested, but it would probably not be an American breakfast, but more likely a bread choice with spread, some fruit and coffee/tea/juice and that's it.

If I had to take a guess, I think the vast majority of people will use the buffet and greatest risk from doing so will continue to be norovirus. If you know how to protect yourself from norovirus at a buffet, then coronavirus is easy to avoid.

RedSun

Not really. If I go with buffet food now, I'd want the buffet stands staffed and watched. A lot people do not wear mask. Personally I do not want to wear mask when I sit down to get my food. If the hotels serve buffet now, most of the guests probably won't go there. Things may change, but I do not know when.

bocastephen

I agree, I want the buffets modified before I will go back - specifically I want the number of people up there to be limited, I want everyone to wear a mask, I want everyone to wear one foodservice glove on the hand they use to touch the utensils, I want them to never touch food with their hand, gloved or not, and I want them to use a clean dish with every trip to the buffet - and if they violate these requirements and refuse to cooperate, I want them thrown out and banned from re-entry. I want other guests to help the staff in policing these policies so the buffet can remain open and safe for everyone as I do not want to be the only person hollering at some damn fool who thinks rules in public don't apply to them. Getting this setup should not be a major issue for the majority of restaurant buffets.

Some organizations may need deeper policy changes - for example, the United Club where the Sodexo food service contract workers are instructed never to interact with or admonish guests and always look for a United employee for assistance, that stupid policy needs to change, so, for example, I never need to watch some dumb twit loading her used dirty bowl with noodles, then put half back in the serving platter, while I am hollering at the brain-dead Sodexo worker who is just staring ahead like a zombie, unable to do anything.

Some places, though, are a lost cause - Air Canada's Maple Leaf Lounges, for example, where after witnessing some of the most disgusting shared food service behavior I've seen anywhere in the world (including China), even the health inspector I called to file a complaint about reusing dirty dishes at the buffet seemed completely clueless and lost about why that is a bad thing and flat out told me that in Canada, they don't understand why re-using dirty dishes at a buffet is a bad thing - hence, the Canadian person I had management at the LAX *A lounge throw out back to the terminal for refusing to follow their instructions.

Since most of my Marriott stays are in Asia, such as Japan, Singapore and Korea, I can comfortably say I've rarely witnessed any objectionable behavior in a lounge at an APAC Marriott property aside from Chinese tourists at the Sheraton Grande Taipei in Taiwan, which was another trip to the hospital for norovirus for me - let's see if coronavirus scares the begeezus out of the rest of the world sufficiently enough to knock off the dirty habits prevalent elsewhere.

Bottom line, I think it would be useful to have a food service safety thread where people can point out changes, improvement, issues and concerns about Marriott properties worldwide as their various restaurants and buffets re-open over the next few months. That way people can be aware of risks and issues ahead of time and decide accordingly what's best for them.

RedSun

It all takes time for people to get comfortable. No one can force anything. Travel is a leisure business and it is not the business to take on risks....

Flying for Fun

I appreciate your thoughtful reply. While they haven't found evidence of food-born transmission, it does not necessarily mean that evidence doesn't exist, just that they haven't found it.

On the Diamond Princes they found Coronavirus RNA on surfaces 17 days after the passengers disembarked. While the RNA is not live and it only shows that the Coronavirus was there at some point in time, Coronavirus lived on surfaces for 9 days in a Laboratory. While a laboratory is a controlled environment, could Coronavirus not live on a surface at a buffet for at least several hours?

Coronavirus cruise ship surfaces study

“As we know, the longest a coronavirus can last on a surface is nine days in a laboratory — you can’t get it to last longer than that,” he said. “So this identification does not have any impact on transmission on the risk for humans, it just simply means that at one time or another, the virus happened to be on their ship.”

Also in the article,

A study published last week in the New England Journal of Medicine found that the novel coronavirus can remain “viable and infectious” in droplets in the air for hours and on surfaces up to days.Scientists from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the U.S. National Institutes of Health, attempted to mimic the virus deposited from an infected person onto everyday surfaces in a household or hospital setting, such as through coughing or touching objects.

The tests show that when the virus is carried by the droplets released when someone coughs or sneezes, it remains viable, or able to still infect people, in aerosols for at least three hours.

On plastic and stainless steel, viable virus could be detected after three days. On cardboard, the virus was not viable after 24 hours. On copper, it took four hours for the virus to become inactivated.

However, Tetro said the NIAID study was conducted in a laboratory, in a controlled environment. “When you look at real-life situations, the virus will have an exponential decay over the first few hours, no matter what surface it happens to be on,” he said. “The real risk only occurs over the course of a half day, and then after that, it’s not so much of a risk.”

If someone at the buffet sneezes or coughs and expells Coronavirus or even releases aerosol with a raised voice to compensate for the social distancing that may land on surfaces around the food that may later contaminate the food or on the food itself, how can you unequivocally state with "Ever Never" certainty that a patron cannot be be infected. I wouldn't make such a claim. The risk might be lower but not zero. The same goes for a la carte food prepared in the kitchen. Lower risk than a buffet, but still not zero.

James