Retail is not a hotbed of infection, so why not let shops reopen?

The people of Ireland are, for the second time, successfully driving down what were rampant coronavirus infection rates. But an underlying failure of the State’s response is that we still have no clear idea of precisely how that suppression is being achieved. Which specific restrictions among the mélange that are being implemented are most effective?

This basic knowledge gap will hobble any future attempts to reopen the economy, and its negative effects are being most acutely felt in retail. The world and its dog know that traditional retailing activity is not a significant source of coronavirus transmission. Certainly not enough to shut it down.

Not a scrap of data has been produced here or anywhere else in the world to prove otherwise. Only 26 of the 7,266 virus clusters recorded here to date have been linked to retail environments. Infection rates among workers at major retailers such as Lidl, Aldi, Tesco, Spar, Eason, Penneys, Ikea and Circle K are actually lower than the national average.

How can policymakers know which screws to loosen if they still don't understand which ones staunched the flow of new cases when everything was tightened up for lockdown?

Yet here we are, in the middle of what is the retail sector’s most crucial trading period, and most non-grocery stores in the State are still under forced closure. The most recent lockdown put an estimated 60,000 retail staff out of work, yet it is likely that their sacrifice is doing little of the heavy lifting with the ongoing virus suppression. That anomaly cannot be justified by any self-serving doublespeak from State officials.

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Unfortunately, the sector’s calls for an earlier reopening of shops are likely to go unheeded.

Reopening an economy without knowing which restrictions work best is like riding a bike blindfolded. It will always be safer not to attempt it. Yet we simply must reopen the economy and society soon. But how can policymakers know which screws to loosen if they still don’t understand which ones staunched the flow of new cases when everything was tightened up for lockdown?

Was it the imposition of Level-5 restrictions on October 22nd that turned the tide? Its proponents will argue yes, but the evidence suggests this may not be the full story, as the testing positivity rate had already begun to improve the previous weekend and the infection rate curve was already beginning to flatten.

Time lag

By that stage, Dublin had already been on Level-3 restrictions for a whole month, which had steadied the ship but had not yet appeared to set infection rates on to a safer downwards course.

Yet in his appraisal of how the State handled the first reopening phase in early summer, Economic and Social Research Institute behavioural scientist and National Public Health Emergency Team adviser Pete Lunn argued in The Irish Times in September that there may have been a significant time lag of six or eight weeks for people to fully change their behaviour when restrictions were eased in May.

Was there a similar lag for behavioural change in the other direction after Level-3 restrictions came in nationwide on October 7th?

No matter how stridently public health officials protest, the retail sector has a strong case when it argues that shops should be allowed to reopen early

There appears to be a growing consensus among public health specialists that interactions in private households are the biggest culprit in spreading the virus. So it is logical to raise the question of whether the Government’s decision to ban all household visits from October 16th is among the measures that were most effective in putting the virus on the back foot. It fits neatly with the timeline of when infection rates started to fall in earnest, which was over the last fortnight.

If the Government had stuck with Level-3 restrictions for most of the country, with stricter measures for virulent hotspots such as Donegal, and enforced all of this alongside a nationwide ban on those clearly culpable home visits, could much of the damage we are currently wreaking on the economy under Level 5 have been avoided?

As someone who until March thought epidemiology sounded like a rash that you could treat with Sudocrem, I simply don’t know the correct answer to that question and I have only my suspicions and instincts. But the depressing thing is that our policymakers don’t seem to know the answer to that question either.

Economic damage

It was clear from early October that virus rates were spinning out of control and that this is the root cause of the economic damage now being wrought. How we allowed ourselves to get into such an invidious position in the first place is a different argument. But that’s where we were and it had to be addressed. Only ideological ostriches with their heads in the sand will argue otherwise.

Something had to be done. But it is a policymaking failure that we still don’t know the most effective definition of “something”.

It is worth asking whether the Government could have held its nerve in the face of the incessant public pressure that was piled on to elected representatives by civil servants such as the chief medical officer, Tony Holohan. If it had, perhaps retailers might be in a better place now.

Opening up all “non-essential” shops for Christmas shopping a couple of weeks early would help to ease some of the inevitable (and potentially dangerous) congestion that we are storing up for December. It would put tens of thousands of people back in work and take them off the pandemic unemployment payment.

It would lessen the economic leakage caused by people doing their Christmas shopping on Amazon. It would save millions of euro of taxpayers' money, which could be diverted for other uses such as building much-needed virus-testing infrastructure at the State's ports of entry.

It might also make this lockdown feel just a little less miserable. Morale matters. So does evidence. No matter how stridently public health officials protest, the retail sector has a strong case when it argues that shops should be allowed to reopen earlier than the rest of the economy.

Retailing is not a significant culprit when it comes to infection rates. Anybody who wants to argue otherwise should do so armed with empirical evidence backing up their case, or else they should consider staying quiet.