Eat Out to Help Out – one of the few things the government have got right in the last few months – Simon Carter

The Eat Out to Help Out scheme, from my own personal experience, has been a huge success in encouraging Joe Public to support the hospitality industry.

I’ve used the scheme at least twice a week since it was introduced at the beginning of the month, using it to visit places I’d never eaten at before. It hasn’t been easy - many places have been fully booked days in advance.

I’m a big fan of the scheme, though to be honest I’m a big fan of anything that entices anyone out of their houses these days. I’m sure some people, thanks to the scaremongering so rampant in today’s pandemic-related lockdown, have no wish to leave their homes until 2021 at the earliest.

Mrs Miggins of Fratton could be forgiven - if she watches the national news every night or scans her social media feed regularly - for being swept up in the paranoia, via the scaremongering, that has a vice-like grip on swathes of the population. For it’s always been about the number of deaths, with little mention of the recovery rates; it’s always been about the worst-case scenarios; and now, with daily death rates finally falling to low figures, it’s all about rising case numbers instead. Forever negative, rarely positive - and forever providing fuel for the keyboard warriors to gleefully pour onto the raging inferno of fear. Rarely a sense of perspective either.

Recently, the number of covid deaths in the UK was just 2.2 per cent of the total deaths in one given week. For a few weeks in a row, the number of total deaths recorded in the UK was DOWN on the similar period in 2019. They are items of Good News, but I don’t recall them ever being mentioned on the national news or trumpeted by the government. I guess they don’t fit the narrative.

Writing in this column last week, I wondered how many people had died in the UK of covid-19 who didn’t have an underlying health condition. In terms of hospital deaths for under-60s, and out of a UK population of around 67 million, the answer is just under 1,500. Around 0.002 per cent.

While obviously even one death is one too many - even one death a tragedy for family and friends of the deceased - the chances of a relatively healthy person dying from covid is incredibly small. It has always been incredibly small, certainly not deserving of shutting down society in the way the government have done.

And not deserving of the way the government have destroyed the economy, putting tens of thousands of hard-working employees out of a job in the process and hammering the final nail into the high street’s coffin. And not deserving, either, of the way they have shamefully treated our children

Yes, the Eat Out to Help Out scheme is a success - a survey suggested around 22 million people have used or plan to use it in August. But visiting restaurants in the last few weeks just highlights the lack of joined up thinking in the government’s recovery plan.

In one restaurant, I counted two tables of 12 people crammed shoulder to shoulder together, groups that included pensioners and children and most ages in between. That is allowed - the scheme’s Q and As make no mention of minimum group sizes.

But that’s certainly not the case elsewhere in society. Until last Friday, spectators couldn’t even attend non-league football matches taking place in the open air. Now they finally can, social distancing has to be in place with no more than six in a particular spectator group.

So let me get this right: 12 people can cram onto a table in a busy restaurant indoors, but only half that number can stand together in the fresh air around the perimeter of a football pitch? Mmmmmm ….

In most of the places I’ve eaten at, the staff have been wearing face masks - but not in every restaurant. While this has not kept me awake at night fretting about being caught up in the second wave so often talked about by our national media, surely there should be some common guidelines for staff to adhere to? In the same way there’s enough guidance - wow, is there enough guidance - for Joe Public.

Visiting a McDonald’s the other day, I was told I had to wear a mask while tapping out my order on one of their big screens. But as soon as I’d done that and sat down at a table to wait for my food - as SOON as I’d done that! - I could whip the mask off. The logic escapes me. It took 30 seconds to order the food, and 10 minutes (with no mask in place) for it to arrive.

I’ve mentioned a few examples here, but there are many others to illustrate the lack of a fully aligned approach, how one section of society has been treated totally differently to others, how some businesses have been getting lots of helps and others patently ignored, how some groups are allowed to cram together in an enclosed space and others have to be ordered to stand apart.

I’ve asked this question before, and it’s worth asking it again: who’d want to be Boris Johnson over the past five months? Not me, for one. But he has been very unlucky. After all, we were always told that being Prime Minister was his dream job, the one he had craved for most of his adult life. How painfully ironic, therefore, that - outside of encouraging people to fill their stomachs with half-price food - he appears to be so inept at it. In anyone’s book, that is jolly bad luck ...