Did the Eat Out to Help Out scheme help to spread Covid-19? That is the eye-catching claim of Thiemo Fetzer, an associate professor of economics at the University of Warwick. In a working paper entitled: Subsidising the Spread of Covid-19: evidence from the UK’s Eat Out to Help Out Scheme, he estimates that the scheme accounted for between eight and 17 per cent of Covid clusters during August, when it operated.
Given that the scheme cost taxpayers £500 million, it is not a bad idea to attempt to work out what it achieved, if anything. Nevertheless, there is something a little unsatisfactory about this claim – not least because Fetzer admits in his paper that his claim is based on a ‘back of the envelope’ calculation.
It is all very well establishing a correlation between meals consumed under Eat Out to Help Out and local clusters of Covid infections.
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