In March 2020, reports claimed the World Health Organisation (WHO) had warned against using cash amid fears it could be spreading coronavirus. The WHO later pushed back on the claim, declaring it had never issued any official warnings – but it wasn’t the only whisperings of ‘dirty cash.’ China had already begun sterilising money in February out of hygiene concerns, and in March the US Federal Reserve started quarantining dollars from Asia, begging an important question: how clean was cash?
In response, retailers across the world began putting more emphasis on cashless transactions, with contactless payments growing by more than 40 percent globally in the first quarter of 2020, according to a survey by Mastercard. A study by data firm Dynata found the preference for cash dropped by 31 percent in the early months of the pandemic across the countries surveyed, and YouGov research found that ATM withdrawals in the UK had fallen by around 60 percent over lockdown.