As others like @jasonfurman have pointed out, it's also a policy that directly encourgages us to do something risky, without any evidence that our test/trace system can absorp the infections it will presumably generate.
An indication of the general problem the govt has, which is that it wants to restart the economy, direct support to the parts hardest hit by the virus, yet has to avoid encouraging resumption of activites we stopped until the virus is otherwise suppressed.
Tying spending vouchers to this highly risky activity seems amongst the worst of voucher policies that could be devised. Almost better simply to give the money to the restaurants, so that they don't need to tempt us to go there and bump into each other.
A feature of the whole package is how disembodied it is from an analysis of what the health policy can take. Does the test/trace system have any XS capacity at all? It seems it might, as infections are slowly falling, but how much? What extra risk-taking activity can happen?
What is the trajectory for that capacity? How does that trajectory match with the hoped for trajectory of the economy and the resumption of risky contact-inducing activity it entails?
Buried in it, a stimulus plan now entails an estimate of the number who are going to die. What is that number? What are the consequences of trying to make that number lower, or higher? How did we choose the number we chose?
Returning to the main point of this thread, the hope with vouchers is that they can be used to target the sectors hardest hit. More general stimulus benefits all sectors, yet all sectors were not hit equally by the virus, so this seems inefficient.
However, the reason those sectors were hardest hit was because they were either shut down by government, or perceived as risky by consumers. Almost definitionally, a policy that efficiently addresses economic harm also maximises viral risk.
This would only not be true if consumers were overstating the risks; or that although there were initially risks as the viral load built up, forcing the lockdown and private distancing, those risks had gone away.
