The most common place that people have visited in the days leading up to a positive coronavirus test has been revealed as supermarkets.
Public Health England (PHE) retraced the steps and analysed the contacts of 128,808 people using the NHS Test and Trace app to find where the most common places people visited before their positive Covid test.
All had tested positive for Covid-19 between November 9 and November 15, Sky News reports.
However, PHE did not prove where people were contracting the coronavirus and people's houses remain the main cause of transmission. So in other words, there is no proof that people caught coronavirus in a supermarket.
Of those who tested positive for the virus in the days analysed by PHE, 18.3% of them said they had visited a supermarket, TheMirror reports.
People who tested positive before showing any symptoms were the most likely to have gone shopping, attended a childcare educational setting or had been out for a meal. The number of contacts by exposure was shown to be highest among households and household visitors.
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In total approximately 9,789 common locations were reported:
- Supermarket - 18.3%
- Secondary school - 12.7%
- Primary school - 10.1%
- Hospital - 3.6%
- Care home - 2.8%
- College - 2.4%
- Warehouse - 2.2%
- Nursery preschool - 1.8%
- Pub or bar - 1.6%
- Hospitality - 1.5%
- University - 1.4%
- Manufacture engineering - 1.4%
- Household fewer than five - 1.2%
- General practice - 1.1%
- Gym - 1.1%
- Restaurant or cafe - 1.0%
Helen Dickinson, chief executive of the British Retail Consortium, said: "Supermarkets are one of the very few places that people can visit during lockdown so it is unsurprising that they feature strongly when people are asked where they have visited.
"Retailers continue to follow all safety guidance to make their premises COVID-secure."
