Covid

The hospitality industry like many others is under terrific pressure due to the government response to this virus.

According to the government ons site updated to the 17th of July the number of deaths year to date over and above the last 5 year average in England and Wales is 53498. That equates to 1 in every 1048 people (google population data for England and Wales being 56.1 million). There is no up to date data for the number of incremental suicides during the same period. There may have been incremental deaths due to the stress of lockdown and financial ruin.

The greater risk to our civilisation.

Europe has enormous debt problems. If you include private, corporate, state debt plus state unfunded liabilities (such as public servant pensions etc) it may have been around 4-5 years of GDP (that denominator has just taken a bit of a dent!) for a lot of European countries before lockdown. These numbers have become a lot worse. The banking system in Europe is very fragile with a lot of banks only having around 5% in shareholder capital before the crises – that thin cushion is being rapidly eroded. Nobody will be able to predict the outcome if we totally destroy the economies of Europe but I am sure there will be many more deaths than we have seen from Covid.