and more than one plague.

The question now is can they weather

the coronavirus pandemic?

Everyone is wondering whether the pub industry

is on the verge of collapse.

So what this chart shows us is spending in UK pubs

compared to the same day of the week in 2019.

Zero here is the baseline.

You can see that it dropped by 100 per cent

- so completely - during the lockdown.

And then, as it reopened, spending actually

exceeded what happened in 2019 in the months between August

and even just before the beginning of October.

Pubs had to be closed.

There really wasn't a choice.

Those people who tested positive for coronavirus

were twice as likely to have been at a restaurant

than those who tested negative.

And in the chart we can see it in the blue bar, dark blue bar.

And that was also true in the UK.

We've got here some data from Public Health England that

shows that shopping and eating out

were the activities most likely to be reported

amongst those people who tested positive for coronavirus.

So the same rings true for the UK.

When the case count started to drop,

the chancellor, Rishi Sunak, decided

that once pubs had reopened, he would actually

actively incentivise people to go to pubs.

So people were given a discount and encouraged

to eat in pubs and restaurants, and bars and pubs

were the venues that had the most

windfall from this activity.

But these venues are hotspots for coronavirus transmissions,

so that's why we're here today on the last day of pubs being

open in England before a nationwide lockdown that

should last a month.

I don't have a crystal ball to tell you what happens next.

But it's reasonable to expect that amongst the millions

of people who work in the hospitality industry and who

are more likely to be young - under 35 -

women and in a part-time and low-paid jobs,

a lot of them might not come back to a job.

We know that the people who have been furloughed

are more likely to be low paid, as we can see from this chart.

Also, this chart really shows us what's

happened to the hospitality industry.

This is quite indicative.

It's weekly hours of work.

And we can see that the pink line, which

is workers in the hospitality sector,

have been more affected than the average.

I think it's important to point out

a bit of historical context.

The number of public houses in the UK

have been declining for a while.

So we've gotten this chart here - number of pubs since 2001.

There's actually two main events that

affected the decline in the number of pubs

and accelerated it.

One is the ban on smoking indoors in pubs,

and the other one is the financial crisis.

So you can see that we went from well over 50,000 pubs

in the early 2000s to about 39,000 now.

According to estimates, the number of pubs

could decline by 25 per cent in the future.

However, we do know... from this chart that I showed you

earlier... that British people are actually very loyal

to pubs, and they're happy to flock back when they reopen

and spend even more than they did in previous years.

So if you're feeling very gloomy about the future of pubs

perhaps it's not all bad news.