WHILST the Prime Minister is “optimistic” about the prospect of summer holidays, healthcare workers are desperately fighting the third wave of Covid-19. And so life continues, trapped in a brutal cycle of opening up and closing down with no lessons learned.

I cannot help imagine the catastrophic ways the UK Government will attempt to re-open the economy after this lockdown. Namely, I fear the return of schemes like Eat Out To Help Out that place the burden of struggling businesses on individuals to spend money and risk catching coronavirus.

It is the UK Government’s responsibility to sustain the restaurant industry in ways that do not kill us. Yet the past year has been a horror story of supposedly unrelated blunders by Westminster.

In July, as headlines declared the UK’s excess death rate the highest in Europe, the Government allowed restaurants to re-open. Better yet, it encouraged the British public to go to these restaurants with an irresistible 50% discount.

As scientists deemed indoor gatherings the single most infectious environment, Rishi Sunak pretended to serve diners in a Wagamama photo op, brandishing two plates, upturned sleeves, and an unmasked, toothy smile during an airborne viral pandemic.

The most dangerous aspect of infection is hidden in plain sight: air. The risk of infection is 20 times higher indoors and worsens the longer people linger and talk. Whilst outdoor dining is safer though not without risk, the discount inexplicably did not apply to the safest option: takeaway.

People scrambled for a taste of life as it once was, lulled by measures such as temperature checks and tables flanked by Plexiglass, which have been proven ineffective. Like a local McDonalds, the Government reported 160 million meals served. Households crowded indoors en masse, but at least customers saved an average of £5.24 a meal.

Sunak did not consult the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) about the scheme, a report from the Institute for Government revealed. Research from the University of Warwick suggests the scheme can be linked to 17% of clusters last summer, a finding the Treasury rejected.

Eat Out To Help Out falls within the UK Government’s overall Covid strategy to prioritise individual responsibility over state duty. They have consistently pitted the economy against public health as if they do not rely on one another.

This policy particularly agonised me as a freelance food writer. Restaurants deserve the full financial support they need and I am keen to see them return in full strength. But dangerous, stopgap measures like these are not worth the threat to public health.

The economic benefit of Eat Out To Help Out was tenuous. A British Chambers of Commerce spokesperson said the scheme had a “fairly marginal” impact on the sector.

Now the UK has the highest death rate per capita in the world, beating America, a country without a nationalised health service in which 26.1m people had no healthcare coverage in 2019.

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The nation recently marked 100,000 lives lost, and counting, to coronavirus. Boris Johnson pulled a sad face for the front pages and vowed that when this pandemic is over “we will make sure we learn the lessons and reflect and prepare”. Prime Minister, that time is now.

It is our personal responsibility to stay home — and have the means to do so — but Johnson and the Conservative Party refuse to take personal responsibility and do better.

We continue to suffer from the disasters of the UK Government’s own making. Worse still, this distracting cascade of bad news works in their benefit. When there is so much to crush us, we are less able to hold those in power to account.

FROM the first lockdown, there were calls for the general public to support struggling restaurants and shops. It was a simple, feel-good message: show some love to your local. Ordering a takeaway to offset the doom of lockdown could feel virtuous.

This message, however well-intentioned, is misplaced. It assumes ordinary people have expendable income during a financially crushing pandemic, nonetheless the titanic buying power to sustain entire industries.

Just as the disgrace of child food poverty cannot be solved by food banks, neither can restaurants scrape by without government intervention. That is, enough financial support for restaurants to stay closed and to pay their workers to stay at home.

Instead of whiplash return-to-normal schemes bookended by lockdowns, would it make too much sense for Westminster to enact sustainable Covid-safe policies?

For this pandemic to ever end, the PM and his ministers would have to admit they were wrong about so much and continue to be. Wrong to Eat Out To Help Out. But this would require accountability and self-reflection, which so far, has been absent from Westminster.