A quarter of the country has been in quarantine since March with 5 million people contacted by the NHS or Test and Trace app

Up to 5 million Britons could had to isolate themselves in recent months after coming into contact with someone with Covid-19, a new survey suggests.

The survey for I by Redfield & Wilton Strategies revealed that more than a quarter of the country has been forced into quarantine at some point since coronavirus restrictions began to ease in March of this year.

He comes as ministers get ready to relax the self-isolation rules, doubly vaccinated people to be exempted from the measure from mid-August. The NHS Covid app could also be changed to make it less sensitive, so that fewer people end up being ‘pinched’ due to spending time near someone who is later found to be infected.

Of the 1,500 people surveyed, 22% said they had been told to self-isolate at least once in the past four months. Of these, 21% tested positive for the coronavirus, 24% were living with someone with Covid-19 and 6% had to be quarantined after returning from abroad.

30% were contacted by phone by NHS Test and Trace, while 20% received a notification from the app asking them to self-isolate. If these numbers are representative of the national population as a whole, it suggests that the total number of people who have self-isolated as a result of contact tracing is over 5 million.

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Anecdotal reports suggest that as the number of Covid-19 infections increases, more people have deleted the app or disabled its bluetooth function they can therefore no longer be contacted if they come into contact with an infected person. But a slim majority – 54% – of those surveyed said they had the app on their phone.

The app works by keeping a record whenever two users spend 15 minutes or more within two meters of each other. If one of them tests positive for the coronavirus, an alert is then automatically sent to the other telling them to quarantine themselves until 10 days have passed since the meeting.

The self-isolation instruction is not legally binding, as the system operates anonymously and is therefore not enforceable. The ministers insisted that people should nonetheless follow the guidelines in order to break the chains of transmission of the virus.