The pandemic has completely transformed the way New Yorkers eat out: there are sidewalk tables, open streets, streeteries, and hardly anyone eating indoors as a result of the epidemic. Now that the weather is getting colder, there are also plastic bubbles out on the sidewalks. A video of the dome-shaped tents on a West Village street went viral this week, prompting questions about how safe they are, as well as what exactly they are.

A slew of different kinds of bubbles have appeared all over the country since restaurants began to ease into this strange new era of dining out. Café du Soleil, a French restaurant on Broadway and West 104th Street on New York's Upper West Side, was one of the city's early adopters. Owner Nadine Chevreux says her husband began looking into bubbles this summer, concerned about the upcoming cold and wet months. Initially, the couple purchased one from Amazon as an experiment, but diners responded so positively that the couple simply kept buying more. They now have 16 in total, and they appear to be two rows of transparent moon landers standing out on an upper Manhattan sidewalk. So far, customers have embraced them.“Some of them see it almost as a gimmick; it gives it a futuristic feel. It's nice to be able to create your own vibe in your own bubble,” Chevreux says. Not only are the bubbles Instagram-worthy, but they're also "warm and cozy."It's like having your own little private dining room outside,” says Stephen Werther, the owner of Suprema Provisions in the West Village, which recently installed its own bubbles.

However, the igloo-like tents can be expensive to maintain and require strict sanitation measures, and some health experts are skeptical about how safe they actually are. Here's a quick rundown of the facts.

What exactly are these bubbles?

The plastic tents are known by a variety of names, but the most common are pop-up bubble tents, big bubble gazebos,clear dome tent,glamping dome, and winter screen houses. The restaurants in New York City that have opted for bubbles for outdoor dining have purchased them from a company called Alvantor. The clear portion of the bubble is made of PVC and can be opened and closed on all sides with zippers, much like a camping tent. Most restaurants are keeping them open at all times to allow for air circulation, but that may have to change as the weather gets colder.(They are not inflatable; instead, they have frames, similar to conventional tents.)

Were they designed for this?

Unlike some of the more improvised solutions to outdoor dining, Alvantor's bubble tent were always intended to be used as a weatherproof (and mildly insulated) gazebo. While the structures were originally intended for a variety of purposes such as providing shelter in outdoor spaces on a cold or rainy day, the company is now marketing its products directly to restaurants and other businesses that are attempting to navigate the pandemic. According to the product description on Amazon, "Resume your normal activities while maintaining social distance. Perfect for establishing boundaries between yourself and others.”

What restaurants are utilizing them?

So far, the Alvantor bubbles have been seen at Lucciola, Café du Soleil, and Suprema Provisions, and similar bubbles have also been spotted at City Vineyard. Other restaurants, such as Industry Kitchen and Ampia rooftop in the Financial District, as well as Estuary in Brooklyn Bridge Park, have opted for small gabled greenhouses, which certainly have a less space-age feel to them.

Do they get scrubbed down after each meal?

As part of the city's COVID sanitation requirements, the domes have their own protocol: "Enclosed structures," as they are referred to, should be used only for individual parties and should have adequate ventilation and air circulation. The majority of restaurants limit the number of people who can fit in a bubble to six.

Both Chevreux and Werther state that they sanitize the bubble tents after each use, whereas Michele Casadei Massari, chef and owner of Lucciola, also on the Upper West Side, allows his two ten-by-ten bubble tents to be used by only one party per night, so that, in addition to being sanitized, they can air out for 24 hours before being used again. Lucciola only serves a $119 prix fixe menu with wine pairings for diners who choose to drink from the bubbles, which allows the restaurant to recoup its investment in the tents. This also reduces the number of times the servers enter the bubble, lowering the risk to them.

Okay, but here's the big question: Are these things safe?

Along with sanitation protocols, most restaurants use flameless candles inside the bubbles in the hopes of avoiding melt-y fires (PVC is toxic when it burns). The biggest source of concern, however, is COVID, which was the catalyst for the bubble to begin with. Dr. Abraar Karan is an internal medicine specialist at the Brigham and Women's Hospital of Harvard Medical School, and he's best known right now as the guy who said on the internet that blowing bubbles is a bad idea.“Just because you’re in a separate bubble tent does not mean that you’re safe — in fact, you could have a higher risk of getting transmission in that bubble simply because you happen to be in the bubble with someone who has COVID,” he explains.

The fact that you are in the bubble with someone who is not in your pod increases your chances of contracting the virus because you are close together in a somewhat enclosed space, according to Karan: "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 consider how they're cleaned, because if "aerosols remain in there, we know that this has been known to cause infection in other people."

According to Karan, outdoor dining is still the safest option, but it will become increasingly difficult as the weather turns colder.