Big numbers have been a thing during this pandemic. Big numbers of people have fallen sick. Big numbers have died. Big numbers have been spent on furlough schemes around the world. And big numbers have been sent to PPE companies and so on.

What hasn’t been known is how much money nightclubs have lost during lockdown. Nightclubs across the UK were closed last March. England reopened theirs on July 19th, and Wales and Scotland opened them again on August 7th and 9th respectively. Northern Ireland’s nightclubs remain shut at the time of publication.

Now we have a clue. One of the bigger clubs in London, the Egg, lost a lot of money. According to Managing Director Hans-Christian Hess, they lost £20,000 every night they were closed. They open five nights a week, which makes £100,000. And over the roughly 70 weeks which they were closed for in England, that could mean around £7million in lost revenue.

Hess also disclosed he was worried about the government’s plan to introduce vaccine passports for English nightclubs at the end of this month, saying he was “apprehensive”. Exactly why he felt this way is sadly not made clear.

More controversial was his statement that “We have to learn to live with [Covid-19]”, but I suspect he was speaking out of frustration with the current situation the club is in. So I’ll give him a pass – for now, anyway…

So is this kind of figure likely to be the case elsewhere? I asked my ever reliable insider – and his assessment was grim. He said “The smaller clubs won’t have figures like that, but yeah, they’ll be bad. Most of the big nightclubs in the UK would probably have lost a seven-figure sum over this period.”.

He also said, bluntly, that “I’m amazed there’s as much of the scene left as there is. Financially, a lot of these clubs are absolutely f***ed – any more lockdowns this winter and it’s game over.”…