- People try to get more food than they currently need to protect their loved ones in the near future. This urge might easily increase as more people get killed and food supply chains get disturbed by the illness of employees.
- More people are present in the supermarkets than necessary. This is on its turn related to more people being at home, half-filled supermarkets, parents bringing their children, etc.
Social distancing in supermarkets could be improved enormously by regulating the access to supermarkets in the following way:
- Each household gets two single-person entry tickets per week at allotted times for buying groceries to a certain maximum amount.
- The elderly or people needing care can authorize someone to do their shopping.
Providing and checking the entry tickets provides an IT-challenge, but many building blocks are already present:
- Musea issue entry tickets at allotted times for blockbuster exhibitions
- Theaters, football stadiums, etc. already scan tickets
- In the developed world, governments have an accurate overview of households and their members for at least 90% of the population
- Many governments issued digital identities that can be applied for the described authorizations.
Of course, embarking on a course of regulating supermarket access during crisis also has its risks:
- People might get even more worried (but it might as well give people more trust in the government handling the crisis)
- Digital access is still a problem for many people, especially the elderly and the homeless.
- Governments might later abuse the data gathered during the issuing of tickets, thus trespassing on civil liberty rights.
Given these consideration, I feel personally that regulating and controlling supermarket access during the current COVID-19 crisis offers enormous potential to improve social distancing and slow the spread of the virus.
