My coffee shop guy said that his turnover was down 20% on Monday, 30% Tuesday, 40% Wednesday and he knows it will be worse today as Sydney masks up, even in the office. That should mean a lot of workers will be doing it from home!

Suburban cafes will have long coffee queues and my mate who runs a travel business, will have to stay on the pension, which he went on only this year because he could. And now he is thinking about a reverse mortgage to make ends meet.

This is the crazy world created by the Coronavirus. And the costs are mounting, despite the overall economy is going gangbusters, thanks to the early success beating the virus, the big budgets from all governments and record low interest rates.

This has taken unemployment down to a low 5.1% in May but in October last year when the delayed Budget happened, the Treasurer thought unemployment would be, wait for it, 6.5% by, wait for it again, June 2022!

That’s a spectacularly better-than-expected performance by our overall economy but it masks what’s happening to the losers from this damn Coronavirus.

So it’s fair and timely for those of us who have navigated Covid-19 relatively successfully to think about fellow Australians and consider what we can do to help them out.

Personally I’m thinking about drinking more coffee and I’ll be using the $100 vouchers for a long Friday lunch that Gladys gave away in this week’s NSW Budget. And I’ll lock in a hotel stay on that Friday as well with our $100 vouchers, which will give us $200 to put towards a night overlooking Sydney or Darling Harbour! Only a full-on lockdown could ruin my long, good Friday on the town!

The ABS in March this year looked at the hit to business from the virus and here are the stark facts: “72% of businesses had less income as a result of COVID-19, 22% revenue remained the same, 7% revenue increased.”

So the summary is that 7 out of 10 businesses are feeling the heat from the virus. And I reckon employees and consumers should try to keep this in mind. And as businesses are employers who pay wages that form the basis of a decent material life, we all should be trying to help business owners, at least until Pfizer rides to our vaccine rescue in October.

Then we’ll need probably about six months before enough of us are jabbed before those battling businesses might be back to normal. That said, they’ll probably be carrying more debt, and interest rates will be higher.

Deloitte recently counted some of the costs of Covid-19. Here’s a summary, thanks to a great story by Lisa Allen in The Australian today:

• There was an $80 billion revenue black hole in our tourism sector last year as international travel collapsed. 
• We’ve lost 7.6 million international visitors.
• Domestically, tourism saw 45 million fewer hotel and motel stays.
• There were 84 million fewer day trips in 2020 compared to 2019, which was a business-killer for hotels and restaurateurs.
• And listed travel companies have been affected, with the NSW part-lockdown hitting their share prices. Flight Centre’s stock price was down 3.5%, Webjet was off 2.3% and Sydney Airport was off 2.2% yesterday.

But how can we help?

The Deloitte report for Tourism Australia came up with some surprising numbers showing us how we all can help out and have a good time as well.

“If every Australian (on average) added an additional three overnight trips, or 17 day trips, to take seven domestic overnight trips and 10 day trips, or four domestic overnight trips and 27 day trips, per year, we would entirely make up the loss to the Australian economy of the $45bn that international visitors spent here on 2019,” the report said.

Of course, governments could help by making sure quarantine drivers were vaccinated and did daily tests on them to stop the need for lockdowns, like the one in Sydney that has stopped me from going to the Blue Mountains this weekend!

That said, right now there are some powerful forces reducing my desire to go to Europe or the UK for quite a long time.

Hans van Leeuwen in the AFR explained how costly it is to do a channel hop from London to Paris and back.

“Before you even book a ticket and hotel in Paris, you’re set back $1000 a person and a fortnight of lost time,” he revealed.

Paris requires tests before you get in and then Britain wants tests done in Paris before you get back into the UK. And then there are more tests on arrival. If you get the thumbs up, there’ll be five days of self-isolation rather than 10! And the tests aren’t covered on the UK’s national health system (NHS).

All this makes my recent painless and wonderful trip to Port Douglas rethink my international travel plans. I won’t be on QF1 to London until the world is well and truly vaccinated and heading back to normal. All this should help local travel businesses and then we’ll have to come up with a plan to rescue our CBD businesses. That’s going to be a harder row to hoe in the age of Zoom and the work from home trend that has emerged out of that damn virus!