UKH survey suggests low level of transmission in hospitality sector

By Lisa Riley

Published: 26 October, 2020

UK Hospitality (UKH) has released research suggesting that there is a low level of transmissions of Covid-19 in the hospitality sector.

The survey of its members, which covered 568 businesses, across 12,522 venues and employing 358,000 people, found that 1,728 infections were reported within the workforce over the 14 weeks that hospitality businesses had been open.

This translates to an infection rate of 0.48% of employees over the period, with this number of infections covering approximately 20 million work shifts.

Moreover, members taking part in the research reported that they had been notified of 780 customers having been infected with the virus, which equates to 0.06 customer infections per venue.

UKH said it believed there had been 250 million customer visits in the premises surveyed, meaning the notification rate was 0.0003% of all customer visits.

“It is fully appreciated not all staff or customer infections will be revealed to the hospitality venues and so these results will represent an underestimate of the true data,” said CEO Kate Nicholls.

“Equally we have been informed Test and Trace and its equivalents will only contact a venue if there are two or more infections related to that venue, and so this number will not reflect infections identified (though the fact there are relatively low numbers of ‘clusters’ suggests cases are relatively low),” she said.

While there was different data available on infection rates, the data UKH had collected “paints a picture of what we have seen and has been identified to the hospitality sector".

“This is there is an extremely low level of transmission in the hospitality sector, confirming the view measures specifically targeting the hospitality sector are unjustified and should be reconsidered.”

The survey also found businesses had been informed of only 104 cases by Test and Trace since the summer reopening as reported over the weekend.