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

Abstract

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 (P < 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.