Covid-19 still here, need to exercise caution in festive season

Festival shopping at brick and mortar stores during Deepavali has always had its charm. So also melas and special exhibitions that have become part of the celebrations

Festival shopping at brick and mortar stores during Deepavali has always had its charm. So also melas and special exhibitions that have become part of the celebrations of festival of lights. But this year, both retailers and consumers need to exercise utmost caution when it comes to Deepavali shopping.

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Usually, this is the time when retailers go all out to draw huge crowds -- the bigger the better. And what can be better than offers of special discounts and gifts to attract consumers ? But Covid-19 has unfortunately changed all that.

In fact, several outlets that offered huge discounts and attracted massive crowds in Tamil Nadu were forced to down their shutters by the local administration for violating the Standard Operating Procedures meant to contain the spread of Covid-19.

What were these inducements that got the consumers so excited and rush to the venue, throwing caution to the wind? While in one instance, the bait was an inaugural offer of ‘buy any dress for Rs 25’, in the other, it was a T-shirt for Rs 9 and a set of three shirts for Rs 999.

But one saw a similar rush even in an upscale saree shop in Chennai that had announced clearance sale. Here too, the local administration had to shut down the outlet after videos of the crowd inside the shop made the rounds on social media. Here again, there was no social distancing and many of the shoppers were sans the mandatory mask. State health authorities should in fact test all those who went to these ‘sales’.

Going by the crowd frenzy at these outlets, it seems like even the threat of contracting Covid is not a deterrent when it comes to grabbing goodies at a marked down price. Or may be such discounts are even more valuable in these times when people have considerably less disposable incomes to spend on clothes for the festival.

With Deepawali just a fortnight away, there is every likelihood of shoppers and the shopkeepers forgetting the precautions against Covid and committing similar blunders. While consumers are suffering from Covid-fatigue, the retailers, whose businesses have taken a huge hit on account of the pandemic, are desperate for business. Besides, with online shops organising massive festival sales, the brick and mortar stores are really in a panic.

So the civic authorities have to be highly vigilant and prevent super spreader events such as exhibitions and deep discounts that attract huge crowds. They have to ensure all businesses follow the mandated precautionary measures, particularly in respect of staggering the number of visitors or customers, ensuring social distancing norms outside as well as inside the outlets, allowing only those customers who are wearing masks to enter (or providing them with masks) , ensuring the availability of sanitizers at the entrance, etc. Let us not forget that we are finally seeing a decline in the number of coronavirus cases in the country and any let up at this time could well reverse that trend.

Several studies have shown that when a number of people come together, particularly in a closed environment, even one super spreader in the group can infect a very large number of people. And this person may well be asymptomatic or the symptoms may not have manifested as yet. This is the reason why gatherings such as these that would contribute to increasing number of positive cases are to be shunned.

I must mention here, a yet to be peer-reviewed, pre-print article in medRxiv, which puts considerable emphasis on the need for anticipating and preventing superspreading events to cut down on overall transmission rates . “A skewed distribution where few individuals or events are responsible for the majority of transmission, can result in explosive, superspreading events which produce rapid and volatile epidemic dynamics, especially early or late in epidemics”, says the article. (‘Chopping the tail: how preventing super spreading can help to maintain Covid-19 control’)

A good advice indeed, particularly in these festival times.