ARTICLE:

The pandemic has upended the way New Yorkers dine out: There are sidewalk tables, open streets, streeteries, and barely anyone eating indoors. Now, as the weather gets colder, there are also plastic bubbles out on sidewalks, too. A video of the dome-shaped tents on a West Village street went viral this week, prompting questions of how safe they are, not to mention just what they are.

Bubbles of various sorts have shown up around the country since restaurants began to ease into this new, strange era of dining out. [...] But the igloolike tents can also get costly and require strict sanitation measures, and some health experts question how safe they actually are.

... the big question: Are these things safe?

Along with sanitation protocols, most restaurants use flameless candles inside the bubbles in hopes of avoiding any melt-y fires (PVC is toxic when it burns). But the biggest concern is of course the reason for the bubble in the first place, COVID. Dr. Abraar Karan is an internal medicine specialist at the Brigham and Women's Hospital at Harvard Medical School, and he's best known right now as the guy who said bubbles are a bad idea on the internet. "Just because you're in a separate bubble does not mean that you're safe in fact, you could have a more high-risk chance of getting transmission in that bubble just if you happen to be in the bubble with somebody that has COVID," he says.

According to Karan, if you're in the bubble with someone who's not in your pod, you have a higher chance of getting infected with the virus, because you're close together in a somewhat enclosed space: "If you have very poor ventilation where the heat is not escaping, then it's even more conducive to viral spread both by droplets and by aerosol." It's also important to keep in mind how they're cleaned, because if "aerosols remain in there, we know that that's been known to cause infection in other people."

Truly outdoor dining remains the safest option, according to Karan, but that is definitely going to get harder as the weather gets colder.

From the article above,identify the following elements of the economic perspective and list themin the text box below:

• What is the economic problem the article is implicitly addressing?
• What is the choice made by these restaurants?
• As done in class, elaborate a marginal analysis to the choice made by these restaurants.
• What could be the opportunity cost of the choice made by these restaurants