Over and over as the public health warnings have been updated, I’ve assessed the risk of picking up food cooked outside my own home — for myself and my partner, who is immunosuppressed. But what about the risk for the people who prep it, cook it, pack it and deliver it to us?

Restaurant workers make it possible for more people to shelter in place, by putting themselves on the front lines of the pandemic every day. Are we putting them at risk by ordering restaurant food, or are we supporting local businesses? Is it possible we’re doing both at once?

Each city is on its own timeline. Going into the fourth week of lockdown, the toll of the coronavirus in California has skyrocketed to more than 17,000 cases. Los Angeles County officials have urged people to stay home this week to slow the spread of the virus, to avoid stepping out, even for groceries.

The continuing risk to the restaurant industry’s millions of workers — many of whom are already underpaid and undervalued, uninsured and unemployed — is high, and only getting higher.

In a New York Times article about Los Angeles hospitals preparing for the peak of the outbreak here, Dr. Elaine Batchlor, the chief executive of Martin Luther King Jr. Community Hospital, made the point that people who were vulnerable to the virus tended to be workers whose job it was to care for others, but who hadn’t received care themselves.