Exactly right. Johnson takes the judgement that the 'tidal wave' doesn't justify another lockdown, but he wants to scare people out of hospitality to reduce infections, without compensating businesses.
https://twitter.com/jessicaelgot/status/1470129782436290570
He wants to look like he is taking action, distract from the parties topic, and do this without antagonising the Covid Research Group who are anti-lockdowns, which they think are 'socialist'. As @help_its_louis remarks, in some ways we are back to the start of the pandemic.
Sadly, very important economic and public health decisions, are highly politicized. Not that these decisions shouldn't be taken by those we elect. But that they shouldn't be coloured by the decision maker's political fortunes.
Trying to control omicron this way places the burden on the risk averse and the vulnerable, who will listen to the risk assessments and stay away.
Two years into this pandemic, many of us I'm sure would like to know what capacity building we have helped the NHS do to ride these tidal waves without lockdowns.
There are some on here who take the view that this could be life now. Regular waves of new variants. A significant lag while vaccines catch up with tweaks, or boosters. Surges of cases and hospitalizations and deaths in the mean time.
If that's the case then there is an argument that hospitality will just have to adapt itself, eventually. State support should just be to ease the transition. There will be less of it as activities become unprofitable and it will be more expensive, as a result.
If the future is brighter, + we find super-vaccines that pre-empt any variant, or lags between variants and vaccine tweaks/boosts get very short, or covid itself is slowly squeezed so that the frequency of these variants drops off, support now is more tenable.
To be fair to the government, we don't know how things will play out. So the decision is not clear cut.
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