How many coronavirus cases are from the hospitality industry?
The data from the Weekly Surveillance Report looked at the number of acute respiratory infection incidents by institution, broken down into weeks.
The sectors included were care homes, hospitals, education settings, prisons, workplace settings, food outlets/restaurants and other.
The data found food outlet/restaurant setting had 5.18% of cases for the 11 weeks from 9 July – the week after pubs reopened. Two sectors saw a smaller percentage – prison 0.65% and hospitals 4.24% on average for the period.
However, educational settings (schools, universities etc) saw recorded cases of coronavirus infections of almost four times higher than hospitality, with an average of 19.89%.
Individual weeks
Not far behind was workplace settings at 17.14% with care homes accounting for the largest percentage at 41.95% and ‘other’, 10.95%.
Looking at the individual weeks, the week before the 10pm curfew was announced (week 38, commencing 18 September), the data shows the food outlet/restaurant setting had 2.85% of recorded cases (22 of 772).
Care homes saw a quarter (25.26% or 195 of the 772) of cases, there were 341 in educational settings (44.17%), workplace settings saw 124 cases (16.06%), hospitals 36 (4.66%) and other was 48 (6.22%).
The week prior to this (week 37, commencing 11 September) the food outlet/restaurant sector was 3.29% (34 of 729 cases).
Compared to care homes – 42.94%, hospitals were 2.47%, educational settings were 26.47%, prisons 0.55%, workplace settings 15.01% and ‘other’ 7.82%.
Week commencing | Percentage of overall cases (PHE data) |
9 July | 0.39% |
17 July | 0.77% |
23 July | 5.44% |
31 July | 6.25% |
7 August | 5.63% |
14 August | 6.42% |
21 August | 6.29% |
28 August | 11.23% |
4 September | 15.45% |
11 September | 3.29% |
18 September | 2.85% |
TOTAL % SINCE W/C 9 JULY | 5.18% |
Curfew impact
This comes after pubco bosses labelled the Government’s 10pm pub curfew “pointless” and “unnecessary”.
Oakman Inns chief executive Peter Borg-Neal said he was “irritated by the continual lie” that hospitality venues were to blame for rising infection rates.
He added: “A hospitality place following the protocol shouldn't have any transmissions. We haven't. We reckon we have had 1.5m unique customer visits since opening and nobody has caught Covid in an Oakman inn.”
Furthermore, JD Wetherspoon (JDW) boss Tim Martin called for scientists to publish evidence of coronavirus transmission in pubsv and questioned if it exists last month (11 August).
In a statement, he outlined that five of his 43,000 members of staff had tested positive for the virus by the time lockdown measures were announced on 20 March.
Martin also highlighted how an outbreak of the virus in Aberdeen appeared to reinforce assumptions about the role played by pubs.
