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.

Couldn't use it as we were shielding.
Shame, could have done with a decent meal.

I think it was ill-advised.

And described the GBD's Carl Heneghan as "that fuckwit".

Questioning the level of information we’re paying for with this enquiry

Sounds on par with your typical Covid mn thread

I was fine with it and don't think that it caused that much of an issue.

Ridiculous with the added twist that obesity was a risk factor for a more severe reaction to the virus.

I still can't get over the people who one minute were shrieking hysterically at anyone (me) who had the temerity to take the children outdoors for exercise twice a day rather than once, and then days later were skipping off to "eat out to help out" because Rishi told them to.

Yes the govt are hugely culpable, but I also found it astonishing how little rational thinking most people apply to their decision making

After lockdown and no eating out I went twice a week at least and enjoyed getting out again. I think local restaurants were happy with it. In retrospect it did probably increase Covid but hard to tell as Covid came in waves up and down anyway.

Hopefully they will also get the statistician who analysed it and talked about it moving the wave forward by about three days

The enquiry sounds jam packed to the rafters with one side of the harm

Agree, although as @SweetSakura says mn and general sm was still full of the 'I am entitled to go out for this, but how dare people take germ ridden, disease carrier children out as well'!
Remember a sm post locally 'please remember children should really stay at home and not be out and about publicly if they are at school, I was horrified to see some on Sunday at the restaurant when i was out for lunch, I am cev and need protection' 🙄

Putting aside the tens of thousands of unnecessary British deaths you don't seem to care about..

The most profitable quarter of the hospitality industry year includes those several weeks of Christmas and New Years Eve bookings.

Do you remember what happened to those in 2020?

(After the nonsensical chaos of the Tiers.)

All those huge Christmas food orders wasted.

It finished more pubs, hotels and restaurants than the first lockdown.

And do you remember the second lockdown?

And that more people died in the EOTHO wave than in the first wave where the government did virtually nothing for the first quarter of the year.

EOTHO cost almost a billion pounds, Led to the deaths of British people, and was a disaster for business by causing uncertainty for several months then cancelling Christmas and Nee Year.

Their heart was in the right place in wanting to help the hospitality industry. But in terms of managing the pandemic it was dumb and likely cost lives overall

People's personal messages often contain informal language. It's hard to disagree with her assessment.

More people died in the EOTHO wave despite the Tiers and a second lockdown than in the original Wash Your Hands and a lockdown wave.

And of course the second lockdown may never have been needed if the virus hadn't got an almighty boost back in August, just before the kids went back to school.

Not really.

The enquiry sounds like poor money spent so far. We may as well pay for a covid mn thread to inform and personal views that sound the same. It’s too weighted towards one type of harm.

Unless the media are just picking up one side deliberately

Yanbu.
They should have prioritised teachers and schools instead. Lockdowns were easy IMO but it would have been nice if schools were given piles of money to keep kids ticking over that winter.

The media are hardly picking it up at all to be honest @SunnyEgg

Government and senior civil servants are supposed to be competent, not farting about making decisions based on the heart! It should ALL be down to cold, hard, logic when lives and the economy are at stake.

Agree with your last point. Stupid thing to do to start the next wave by EOTHO just a few weeks ahead of going back to school, which was always going to cause another wave on it's own. Ended up making the bad situation even worse.

A massive chunk of my sister family work in hospitality worked all they way through eat out only 1 got covid and that wasn’t through work

we used it loads everywhere near us was heavily inspected fraction of the tables very well spaced booking slots sanitised and table service
none of us caught covid

It is cold facts. Businesses were going under. All focus could not be on one half of the damage

We don't know that lockdowns were unnecessary. Different researchers and scientists have come to different conclusions about that.

Brilliance. The length and number of lockdowns were patently wrong, as we now know, so anything to help the economy was a good idea.

Eat Out To Help Out didn't help the economy though did it?

It cost nearly a billion pounds and gave the virus a good head start leading to months of disruption, record staff sickness, thousands with long covid out of the workforce, cancelling Christmas, and the second lockdown.

Uninformed madness.

There’s a good analysis on More or Less

It barely moved the days on the next wave