[user104658]

Originally Posted by Niamh.

A friend of mine who is a bar manager in London made the point that advising people not to go bars while not ordering the shut down of bars is going to put them out of business with no social welfare support

What I read was, most bars/restaurants etc. have insurance for things like mandatory shut-downs so if they were TOLD to close they would get an insurance payout and could survive... but if they're allowed to stay open - while everyone is being told not to go - that's a loophole in the insurance and the insurer doesn't have to pay out because it's technically just a lack of customers, not a mandatory shutdown.

Countless hospitality and retail businesses are going to go under, and this is global... the impact on people's livelihoods is frankly going to be catastrophic. I really don't feel like, in the desperate scrabble to control the virus/protect frontline healthcare, enough has been done to mitigate the secondary damage at all and there are going to be a lot of actual deaths by the end of this that have nothing to do with catching the virus.