Eat Out To Help Out: Brilliance or Lunacy?

[verdantverdure]

On the day the Covid Inquiry convenes I thought I'd ask your opinion on Eat Out To Help Out.

Covid case numbers and deaths were low, as we'd done a phased return out of the first lockdown.

Then we had Eat Out To Help Out and it all kicked off again within weeks.

What did you think? At the time? Now?

YABU Eat Out To Help Out was brilliant, I loved it.

YANBU Eat out To Help Out was a bloody stupid idea that was obviously going to help the virus spread, leading to another wave, more economic devastation, and tens of thousands of us dead. And it didn't even help the hospitality industry because it screwed up Christmas which is usually their most profitable quarter.

And @verdantverdure

There were 15,000 excess deaths in the 2022/2023 flu season. Do you think we should be locking everyone down for this too? Where does one draw a line and accept a balancing act between health, the economy and personal liberty?

Children went back to school on June 1st @TooOldForThisNonsense. People were at work, hospitality was open.

We live in the U.K. plenty of our mixing happens indoors year round.

We weren't in lockdown from mid- May to Mid -September 2020 but covid hospitalisations and deaths were low.

Ps - I'm not anti lockdown - I supported the idea of encouraging people to limit interactions in early 2020 to "squash the sombrero" - flatten the peak - in order to prevent health system overwhelm.

I never supported taking kids out of education settings, locking university students in halls, or policing who could use a sodding park bench. Nor did I support scaring people into thinking that the objective was to avoid getting the virus forever - people are getting it now. People will die of it this winter - far fewer, due to herd immunity through vaccines and transmission, but still people will die of it.

So you missed Chris Whitty talking about waves and the length of the pandemic

Do you think he was wrong?

I mean he’s not, not even mners can make those claims

Can you accept he is right though?

Please find the part of your brain that can update with expert information (look up CW if doubting he said above)

So again, @SunnyEgg & @ChatBFP

What's your explanation for why covid numbers were very low for months before EOTHO but at a crisis point sufficient for Chris Whitty and Patrick Vallance to go on tv with their graph of doom three weeks after EOTHO?

1. Why were covid numbers low for months from mid May to mid-September 2020.

1. Why did they rise?

Yes, cases and deaths were low for a bit, but you have a lag between people getting it, people passing it to others, people dying from it.

Plus exponential effect is that

Week 1 - 1 case
Week 2 - 2
Week 3 - 4
Week 4 - 8
Week 5 - 16
Week 6 - 32

You don't get masses of cases imminently.

Plus I suspect people were cautious in mid May, didn't have plans, made plans - that takes a while too!

What's your explanation for why covid numbers were very low for months before EOTHO but at a crisis point sufficient for Chris Whitty and Patrick Vallance to go on tv with their graph of doom three weeks after EOTHO?

• Why were covid numbers low for months from mid May to mid-September 2020.

1. Why did they rise?

@verdantverdure did you read @ChatBFP pp re numbers rising?

I replied to this earlier in the thread but maybe you missed it. A small subsection of children went back to school on 1 June. Reception, Yr 1 and Yr 6. And that was subject to the school having room to have classes of no more than 15 to enable socially distance. Our school couldn't get Yr 6 back then as the school was "full" with Reception and Yr1 plus the key worker kids. Certainly my Yr 3 child had no option to return then.

The full return to school didn't happen until September. That also coincided with the message to return to work for those who could work from home (DH was in that category and was only allowed back into the office from Sept 2020.

I think you can both question the sense of EOTHO as a policy and also acknowledge that it's hard to separate out iits effect from what else was going on at a similar time - return of all school children rather than a select few and end of mandated home working being key changes.

Doubling time was 3 days, wasn't it?
So the growth was more rapid than this.

I'd forgotten it was just reception, and years, 1, 6, 10 and 12 plus the children of key workers @CornishYarg.

It is difficult to separate out the effects of different policies, especially when there was so much chopping and changing.

However it's pretty clear that numbers of cases rose dramatically from almost zero for months to worrying our CMO and CSO by mid September, and doubling increased from not really doubling at all for months to weekly doubling over the same short time frame which largely coincided with EOTHO.

We know from the Covid Inquiry WhatsApps that Matt Hancock reported that EOTHO was already causing problems in August but they'd "kept it out of the press."

Instead of the covid spread starting up again after the children went back to school in September and building from there, it began in August and built rapidly. Literally giving the virus a head start.

To the extent that when asked about the next wave on September 4th 2020 Matt Hancock said the second wave had definitely begun.

And only 3 weeks after EOTHO we were already in crisis again and Chris Whitty and Patrick Vallance went on tv with their graphs of doom to try and get us to understand.

To me, the effect of EOTHO on the trajectory of the pandemic is undeniable.

It was socially, economically, scientifically and mathematically illiterate.

It cost nearly a billion pounds and gave the hospitality sector their worst quarter 4 ever,

Yes @wildfirewonder, it was. But still slow to start with. You had very little "opening" before end of June, little chance for people to make plans etc.

By August, people did have EOTHO (but if restaurants had been open, many people would have used them - frankly, I didn't go to places solely because of the discount), but there were also few restrictions in private homes, illegal raves etc

Yes @CornishYarg, that's exactly it.

I agree that EOTHO was likely "a cause", but was it "the" cause beyond opening hospitality spaces, letting schools return fully, letting people return to offices (my firm let people return voluntarily from July and strongly encouraged them to come in for a catch up if at all possible and no reason for vulnerability). Beaches were rammed, cafes were rammed, even before EOTHO as it was a very warm spring summer and people were desperate.

I don't think that the evidence supports that it is the most significant cause of all considering the general opening up.

Nationally hardly anyone goes to 'illegal raves'.

Care homes had testing.

EOTHO was a government scheme designed to increase mixing. It was fucking stupid. IMO it was ideological.

@wildfirewonder

It was designed to get people to visit restaurants, yes, of course. Because the economy needed it, frankly. I did loads of EOTHO - all outside eating areas. The voucher made no real difference, but the message to support local businesses that needed my help did. Were we all supposed to avoid all eateries until the vaccine was developed?

Were we all supposed to avoid all eateries until the vaccine was developed?
No.

If the scheme had only applied to outdoor areas, that would have been a different matter. The fact you stayed outdoors is not the point.

The government should have supported businesses to stay in business whilst having fewer customers in order to maintain distancing, and also other measures like proper ventilation.

When I say it was ideological, what I mean is the government, IMO, wanted to undermine the scientific advice around transmission risk, COVID security and avoiding infection. So they gave a financial incentive to individuals to persuade them to crowd together.

The government could have supported restaurants in ways that didn't result in crowded indoor environments for half the week, and quiet restaurants the rest of the time.

The government gave £849 million to customers. They could have given it direct to restaurants instead. The scheme was designed to encourage people to behave in a way that was contrary to scientific and medical advice.

@wildfirewonder

I don't disagree with any of your criticisms - it isn't the scheme I would have designed.

The bit I disagree with the OP on is whether it would certainly have avoided the need to lock down in winter 2020 were we not to have had it. And I think the answer may be no, if people were still able to mix indoors in the summer (even if govt preferred outdoors), could visit public places and eat out and if schools went back normally and things stayed relatively open in September (when relying on outside options became harder again). Certainly, there might have been a more organised, better way of doing things and we might have avoided the chaos of the Tier systems, but I am not convinced that you can say that if we'd not done EOTHO, all pubs would have been open for a good season of takings in winter 2020.

I think I disagree with you on the agenda - I think that EOTHO and the back to office messages that started over the summer was an attempt to 1) help the hospitality sector (who still had to pay costs even using furlough), 2) demonstrate to elements of the Tory party / Tory donors that they cared about the economy. Probably mostly 2 - Bojo is a pathological people pleaser (pathological liar too), so much of the covid response (and other policy things - just look at immigration now, telling people you are tough on migration but lowering the threshold to give out visas to please business and keep healthcare afloat has created an almighty political mess for his successor!) amounted to a series of conflicting and contradictory aims. And then no one is happy!

www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/eat-out-help-out-contributed-31511684

Thought it was bonkers and irresponsible, both from the government AND the people who jumped at the chance to get money off a meal out. You couldn't have paid me to go and sit in a crowded restaurant at that time.

Bojo is a pathological people pleaser I don't agree with this. He would have focused on preventing deaths if he wanted to please people generally, IMO.

People always try to excuse him with this 'he's too nice' line. The actions of the government he led were callous, hypocritical and self-serving. None of these things please the electorate.

Doesn't the word "contributed" in the headline rather counter your claim that EOTHO was the root cause of the second wave? Why did other countries across Europe have a second wave?

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/11/26/treasury-ignored-warning-eat-out-made-no-economic-sense/

www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/uk-politics-67451422

www.itv.com/news/2023-10-19/sunak-referred-to-as-dr-death-by-science-adviser-over-eat-out-to-help-out