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What does "safe enough" mean? COVID had a transmission rate that was far from "approach infected person -> you get infected immediately 100%", so the appropriate mental model is that there is some positive correlation between time length of exposure and likelihood of transmission. If you believe masks reduce the likelihood of transmission while you wear them, then wearing a mask half of the time is strictly better than never wearing a mask, and wearing a mask always is strictly better than either. However, if you wear a mask 100% of the time, you can't eat. There's your tradeoff.
You are sitting in a room full of patrons. They are eating and drinking and talking. The idea that a mask worn while going to the bathroom would have any meaningful impact on concentration of virus is fanciful.
It still takes time (and time you are moving around, covering more area), so under the assumptions that believers make it might well reduce transmission risk per visit by like 10%. Do you have any proposals other than just "you don't have to wear masks in restaurants", which is reasonable if you believe they don't do anything anyway but clearly not a solution to the "what easy rule can maximise mask wearing while allowing people to eat" problem that the rule-setters were trying to solve? What you are doing seems analogous to someone who believes air travel is evil and unnecessary asserting that plane designers are stupid for putting wings on planes because they could save materials if they didn't.
The base rate of people having Covid at all is very low, this was true even during the height of the pandemic, especially if they show no symptoms. The reduction in transmission from masks is also very low, even if worn correctly(they won't be). Wearing a mask only part time reduces this further. If you multiply all these low probabilities together you get an absurdly low probability.
The whole thing was security theatre. That 10% reduction sounds like a lot until you realize the base rate is .01 and no one is actually following the protocol enough to actually reduce it by 10%, more like 1%
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"Takeout only"?
Outside seating only if dining in.
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Not the person you're talking to, but I think "restaurants are closed" would have been a reasonable policy. So would "you don't have to wear masks". It's the halfway point of "wear a mask but not the 90% of the time you're at your table" which I found ridiculous.
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All the ended up being unimportant as the end point of the pandemic was everyone gets some natural immunity.
The big difference between the entire town locks themselves in a basement and plays twister for 48 hours and everyone always maintains 6’ of difference is the twister playing people all get covid the first week and the 6’ people it takes 3 months for the entire town to be infected.
(Of course there were reasons to delay infection early for hospital capacity and waiting for vaccines but the true end point was everyone gets it)
The question whether COVID rules like this particular one are reasonable ways to implement a particular goal (reduce transmission rate) given particular assumptions (masks work, ...) is orthogonal to the question of whether the goal and the assumptions are sound, and I doubt we'll get much out of relitigating the latter here for the gorillionth time. It is possible for COVID policy to be misguided, masks to be ineffectual, and the restaurant masking policy to be reasonable (as in sensible given its proponents' beliefs) yet susceptible to the sort of anti-arbitrary-cutoff zinger that the poster above posted, simultaneously.
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