Starting Monday, restaurants can seat groups of up to 10 people at indoor and outdoor dining tables – an increase from the current limit of six – and utilize bar seating for food service with the proper distance between patrons.

“No standing around the bar, ok?” Gov. Charlie Baker said at a press conference Wednesday morning.

With cold weather closing in, many restaurants – and their landlords – are beginning to worry about their ability to sustain their cash flows into the fall and winter.

After highlighting Tuesday’s COVID-19 data that showed 143 new cases, Baker turned his attention to schools and his belief in the importance of bringing students back to the classroom in communities where transmission is very low.

“People shouldn’t be making decisions on this stuff based on one week,” said Baker, who has imposed a series of executive orders over the past six months but also emphasized the importance of local decision-making.

Baker said that in the state’s color-coded system for tracking the transmission by city and town communities can bounce up and down from week to week, and local leaders instead should be looking at three weeks worth of data at a time.

“In many cases, it’s because of a single event or a single institution that creates that, and that’s why we think it’s important for people to look for trends, and trends don’t happen in seven days,” Baker said.