Similar to the situation with McMenamins, another large Northwest restaurant chain, the owner of the Thomason Hospitality Group in Grants Pass is telling Kate Brown that if her statistically unjustified restrictions on restaurants are not lifted soon, the entire chain - including 45 restaurants that previously employed hundreds more that the 500 employees that he has left - will go out of business.

GRANTS PASS, Ore. – Dave Thomason, the owner of Thomason Hospitality Group in Grants Pass. He owns and operates 45 restaurants in the region, including Taprock Northwest Grill. Since the pandemic began, he’s had to lay-off hundreds of employees. If it continues, he says, it’s only going to get worse for his businesses.

“Most likely if this continues, we’ll go out of business,” said Thomason.

One of the Rogue Valley’s most prolific restauranteurs, Dave Thomason, said something’s got to give. He wrote an open letter to Gov. Kate Brown this week pleading for action.

“The numbers for the state of Oregon have firmly put every county I do business in the extreme risk category. We won’t have the opportunity to open up any of our dining rooms until I believe January 1,” said Thomason.

And these are the completely arbitrary statistics that Kate and Pat have come up with, in spite of the fact that multiple states with higher positivity rates, such as Idaho, Arizona, and Florida, have managed to keep their restaurants open.

Thomason said with the current COVID-19 situation, he isn’t hopeful his restaurants will be able to open back up come the new year.

He also said he’s laid off hundreds since the restrictions began. While he still has over 500 employees, he worries about their future.

”Once we get to the first of the year, kinda all bets are off at that point,” said Thomason.

Thomason prides himself, and his company, on following the rules. While others have encouraged him to open his dining rooms, he’s not there yet.

“What’s gonna happen is you’re gonna see a lot of people defy the mandates that have been put in place and open up,” said Thomason.

He believes restaurants should be treated the same way as retail stores, even though people have to take masks off to eat and drink. Currently, retail stores can open at half capacity.

This is the one thing that is completely illogical and hypocritical about Kate and Pat Allen's haphazard response. Any day of the week, you can go to any naumber of larger stors- Home Depot, Walmart, Fred Meyer, etc., and see many, many more people than you would ever see inside a restaurant. Howvever, for reasons unfathombable, and without statistical backing, Kate has determined that somehow, restaurants are a much higher risk for spreading this virus with a 99% recovery rate, and is permanently killing them off.

“We have not experienced any outbreaks whatsoever while we were open. And our expectation would be the same way we would operate once we get the option to open our dining rooms,” said Thomason.

As mentioned before, Kate and the evil twins Pat Allen and Dean Sidelinger have presented zero evidence that restaurants and gyms have been spreaders, including the time from June until November when they were open. The only sliver of evidence I have seen is in a court case where Dean Sidelinger said that around 4% of outbreaks could be traced to restaurants. Considering the Oregon stats that have consistently had a mortality rate of around 1.25%, that's pretty tiny, but to Kate's communistic mind, a tiny percent of a tiny percent somehow justifies destroying countless more jobs and businesses than the number of people who have ever even been sick from COVID19.