Customers dining at TAO Downtown’s outdoor seating in Chelsea in New York City, on July 30, 2020. | Alexi Rosenfeld/Getty Images

You can’t eat with a mask on.

You can’t eat a meal, down a shot, or sip a cup of coffee while wearing a mask.

So if wearing masks inside is crucial to halting the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic — and at this point, just about everyone in the scientific, medical, and public health communities agrees that it is — people can’t be eating or drinking in indoor settings outside the house.

Yet despite this seemingly straightforward logic, many jurisdictions in the US have allowed the partial reopening of bars, restaurants, and coffee shops.

In Washington, DC, for example, Mayor Muriel Bowser is sufficiently concerned about rising case levels that she has limited travel from high-risk areas and ordered people