Substantial transmission of SARS-CoV-2 through casual contact in retail stores: Evidence from matched administrative microdata on card payments and testing

This paper presents quasiexperimental evidence of Covid-19 transmission through casual contact between customers in retail stores. For a large sample of individuals in Denmark, we match card payment data, indicating exactly where and when each individual made purchases, with Covid-19 test data, indi...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:	Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - PNAS Vol. 121; no. 17; p. e2317589121
Main Authors:	Johannesen, Niels, Tang-Andersen Martinello, Alessandro, Meyer, Bjørn Bjørnsson, Vestergaard, Emil Toft, Andersen, Asger Lau, Jensen, Thais Lærkholm
Format:	Journal Article
Language:	English
Published:	United States National Academy of Sciences 23-04-2024
Subjects:	Consumer Behavior COVID-19 Customers Disease transmission Exposure Humans Infections Retail stores SARS-CoV-2 Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 Social Sciences COVID-19 reproduction number transaction data disease transmission
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Summary:	This paper presents quasiexperimental evidence of Covid-19 transmission through casual contact between customers in retail stores. For a large sample of individuals in Denmark, we match card payment data, indicating exactly where and when each individual made purchases, with Covid-19 test data, indicating when each individual was tested and whether the test was positive. The resulting dataset identifies more than 100,000 instances where an infected individual made a purchase in a store and, in each instance, allows us to track the infection dynamics of other individuals who made purchases in the same store around the same time. We estimate transmissions by comparing the infection rate of exposed customers, who made a purchase within 5 min of an infected individual, and nonexposed customers, who made a purchase in the same store 16 to 30 min before. We find that exposure to an infected individual in a store increases the infection rate by around 0.12 percentage points ( < 0.001) between day 3 and day 7 after exposure. The estimates imply that transmissions in stores contributed around 0.04 to the reproduction number for the average infected individual and significantly more in the period where Omicron was the dominant variant.
Bibliography:	ObjectType-Article-1 SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1 ObjectType-Feature-2 content type line 23 Edited by Jose Scheinkman, Columbia University, New York, NY; received October 10, 2023; accepted March 21, 2024
ISSN:	0027-8424 1091-6490 1091-6490
DOI:	10.1073/pnas.2317589121