Assessing risk in the retail environment during the COVID-19 pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused unprecedented disruption, particularly in retail. Where essential demand cannot be fulfilled online, or where more stringent measures have been relaxed, customers must visit shop premises in person. This naturally gives rise to some risk of susceptible individuals (customers or staff) becoming infected. It is essential to minimize this risk as far as possible while retaining economic viability of the shop. We therefore explore and compare the spread of COVID-19 in different shopping situations involving person-to-person interactions: (i) free-flowing, unstructured shopping; (ii) structured shopping (e.g. a queue). We examine which of (i) or (ii) may be preferable for minimizing the spread of COVID-19 in a given shop, subject to constraints such as the geometry of the shop; compliance of the population to local guidelines; and additional safety measures which may be available to the organizers of the shop. We derive a series of conclusions, such as unidirectional free movement being preferable to bidirectional shopping, and that the number of servers should be maximized as long as they can be well protected from infection.