Restaurants to keep log of dinner parties for coronavirus contact tracing upon reopening

Restaurants planning to welcome guests again will be required to keep a log of parties who dine in. That’s one of the requirements under Phase 2 of Gov. Jay Inslee's reopening plans.

Health officials say keeping a log will help with contact tracing, a process that retraces an infected person’s steps to understand who else they may have exposed to the disease.

Gabe Wiborg, co-owner of the Thai restaurant Soi on Capitol Hill, supports that. But the challenge he sees is how to best keep that log. “Handwritten,” he said, “it’s like, you go back and you look and you could hardly read what anybody writes.”

Keeping an electronic file makes sense, but that has its own set of issues.

“Are you sanitizing an iPad after everybody touches it for a table of four because everybody has to write down their information?”

Another requirement for reopening is to operate at half capacity. Wiborg said he and his wife are still weighing whether it makes economic sense to allow diners in-house or to wait the pandemic out.