A pandemic liquor run and the question of curfews
Early Wednesday morning, a Canadian company put out an extraordinary press release about the COVID-19 pandemic. It comes from a company, based in Surrey, B.C., called INEO Tech. INEO is in the strange business of merging advertising with retail surveillance. It makes, installs and sells advertising space on digital “welcoming” panels that also have the function of detecting shoplifters. It will not surprise you to hear that liquor stores are major customers of INEO.
The Wednesday press release, however, is a public-spirited gesture: INEO’S CEO, Kyle hall, decided that Canadians need to hear a warning message, derived from hit company’s proprietary foot-traffic data. For New year’s Eve, the province of British Columbia ordered liquor stores to close their doors early as an anti-pandemic measure, at exactly 8 p.m. The data that INEO gathers in the ordinary course of business allegedly show that this led to a “COVID crunch” of customers after work hours that day.
Throughout the day, in stores that have INEO systems, Christmas Eve 2020 was just as busy overall as New year’s Eve 2020. But in the late hours of dec. 31, shoppers trying to beat the one-time curfew flooded the stores, driving customer traffic to almost three times the dec. 24 level. This seems obviously undesirable from a standpoint of controlling epidemic disease. The crunch did not happen on New year’s Eve in 2019, when the concept of “COVID-19” was just being born far away and there was no early closing of retail stores.
It amounts to one data point; how seriously you want to take it is up to you. In making a possible argument against early retail closings, INEO is almost certainly acting in the interests of its customers, and engaging in opportunistic self-marketing. But this is a natural experiment on a fairly important question.
The health czars in various provinces are considering curfews, and Quebec, of course, has adopted one through early February (fingers crossed). Quebec does appear to now have the lowest rates of disease spread among the six provinces where SARS-COV-2 is on the loose; by one estimate, the reproduction rate of the virus there is below 0.8.
It could be that a one-time race to buy booze before an unusually early deadline, announced at the last minute, creates a “crunch” effect that will not be seen with a curfew that extends over a month or longer. It could be that a curfew encourages isolation and hands-off delivery of essential goods in a way that more than makes up, in reducing the spread of disease, for crunches occurring after work hours. (Those of us who work at home are still, partly or wholly, prisoners of a clock.)
What strikes me is that there’s no indication that anyone checked. INEO’S detection of a “crunch” suggests that B.C.’S approach to New year’s Eve was probably a wild guess, and probably incorrect.
We don’t seem to consider experimental data-gathering approaches to measures like Quebec’s curfew; pilot tests could deliver evidence for or against effects like the crunch in a matter of days. (Maybe someone’s doing experiments of this kind, but if they are, they aren’t citing the data openly later.) There is a self-evident disagreement between Quebec and the rest of the country on whether curfews can help beat the disease, which is not yet in clear decline in Ontario or Manitoba.
INEO’S data on retail customer traffic could yield other insights: how did it become necessary for that company to jump up and down, trying to get the attention of newspapermen, when something both foreseeable and disturbing appeared on their screens? Even on the world scene, I do not see much indication that social measures against the spread of COVID are being tested with all the available surveillance instruments.
researchers are working everywhere to assess various flavours of lockdown, but these analyses generally depend only on the brute endpoint of regional or national case counts. This isn’t how we test vaccines or other medications: normally we dig deeper, trying to understand fine details of how a cure interacts with a disease. Microscopes are often involved!
But when it comes to social and political interventions — including ones that rampage over accepted human rights — our approach seems to be more along the lines of flinging pasta at the wall and seeing what sticks. I comfort myself with the thought that if there is a “next time,” it won’t be anything like this.
‘crunch’ suggests that B.c.’s approach to new Year’s eve was probably a wild guess.