Why is the Sun helping Sunak defend the scheme?
An economics professor who has studied the ‘Eat Out to Help Out’ scheme’s role in spreading coronavirus has criticised the Treasury and the Sun for putting out a misleading defence of the scheme.
Warwick University professor Thiemo Wetzer published an October study which found Rishi Sunak’s scheme contributed to 8-17% of all new local infection clusters during the time the scheme was running.
After the Sun uncritically published Treasury analysis which claimed there was no link between the scheme and Covid cases, Wetzer told Left Foot Forward “the methods used are simply not suitable to reach such a conclusion”.
The Sun claims: “The figures show places such as Westminster and Scarborough and North Devon had very high take-up of Eat Out to Help Out, but very low subsequent Covid cases. Meanwhile Knowsley, Rochdale, Merthyr Tydfil had far higher Covid rates, but lower levels of use of the scheme.”
But Wetzer told Left Foot Forward: “What they seem to be doing is to look at patterns without actually doing any proper econometric analysis. This is not evidence that the scheme has not caused a rise in infections at all as this does not constitute proper analysis that any epidemiologist, economist or applied research would consider as “research”. The methods used are simply not suitable to reach such a conclusion.”
Westminster, Scarborough and Devon are all tourist hotspots in August. Many of those eating out and catching Covid in those areas will test positive and spread the virus somewhere else.
On the other hand, Knowsley, Rochdale and Merthyr Tydfil attract much less visitors, meaning the vast majority of those catching the virus in their restaurants will stay and spread it in those areas.
The Sun’s story did not link to any data and the Treasury has only published the geographic data on where the scheme was used. It has not published its comparison of this data to Covid cases.
The Sun’s story was re-tweeted by lockdown-sceptic radio host Julia Hartley-Brewer and Tory MPs like Alec Shelbrooke and Steve Baker.
This article was re-written to focus on Thiemo Wetzer‘s comments.
Joe Lo is a co-editor of Left Foot Forward
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