- Hi everybody, I'm Catenya McHenry.
Thank you for joining us today on our work from home edition
of our Big Ideas where we delve deeper into faculty research happening here
at the McCombs School of Business. Joining me today is a brand new
faculty member in our IROM department, Avi Collis.
He is an assistant professor, of course, in our IROM,
which is Information, Risk, Operation Management.
Thank you so much for joining us today Avi, it's good to see you
and welcome to McCombs! - Yeah thanks Catenya.
It's great to join the McCombs community. - Well we are glad to have you.
Avi joins us from MIT's Sloan School of Business,
I'm sorry, School of Management. So we are very thrilled to have him here.
Today we're talking about a new piece of research
that he has co-authored with a couple of other professors.
It is called, "Rationing Social Contact
"During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Transmission, Risk, and Social Benefits
"of US Locations." So it basically,
your research focus is on the strategy, and the proper way to re-open.
So talk to me a little bit about just the background
and some highlights of your research. - Yeah sure Catenya.
In March when COVID started rapidly progressing
throughout the country, me and my co-authors Seth Benzell
from Chapman University and Christos Nicolaides
from University of Cyprus, we got together,
and we started thinking about what type of contribution
can we as social scientists provide to the community
so that you it helps them in making better quality decisions.
We were thinking hard about where we could come in and help,
and then at that time we also got access to a really cool
mobile location data which we could use for research purposes,
and all of us have backgrounds in economics,
looking at various benefits of different types of products
and so we got together and then we decided to provide a data-driven
approach to solve this problem of which places should be opened first
and which places should be opened later, and we started doing some data analysis.
So we had different types of data sets. One looking at mobile location data,
which we used to classify the riskiness of locations in terms of how likely
they are to spread pandemics. We also collect data from
the Bureau of Economic Analysis looking at more the economic importance
of these locations, so payrolls, revenues, and employment.
And finally we also have --
do our own original surveys of consumers across the US
looking at how much value they put on different locations
like you know what locations are more important to US consumer.
So we use all these three different data sets to come up with the framework
which helps policymakers decide which places should be opened first
and which places should be opened later.
- And according to your research, which is scientific,
your suggestion was that banks should open first
and then other financial institutions and then general merchandise stores
such as Walmart and Target should be the first businesses to open.
Well now that we are sort of past that and businesses have started to re-open,
but now we've seen cases spike, and now businesses are starting to shut down,
especially in places like California, here in Texas, and also Florida.
So based on your research and based on what's happening,
how do you approach it now?
What would be your suggestions now based on the research?
- That's a great question. So our framework can be used
not only to decide which places to open first, but also to decide
which places then should be shut down as the frequent waves of COVID happen.
That's what we're seeing in Texas right now, right?
Initially in the beginning of May most places such as bars and restaurants
and even gyms and hair salons were opened, re-opened,
but then there's a wave which came again in the past week
when we've seen number of cases increase and then that lead to shutting down
of bars and also like more restrictions on places such as restaurants
which were re-opened. We could use our framework
to not only decide what places should open first but also when the pandemic
gets worse, which places should be shut down first.
For example what we find is that indoor restaurants and bars
are quite risky in terms of transmission of pandemics.
We, for example, see that I know lots of people come to these locations.
They're in close proximity, and they spend a significant
amount of time within that space especially if it's indoors and that's
probably not great for like transmission of pandemics.
Yeah, and then on the other hand we're looking at grocery stores
and department stores and banks and also universities.
They provide a lot of economic benefits to the surrounding communities.
They're highly valued by consumers because they're essential for many
consumers to do like their day to day activities, and finally many of them
are bigger spaces where if let's say you have proper density controls
you could spread people out better and have enough safe distance
between customers and you could potentially reopen them
without as much risk as some other locations.
- Yeah, so does your research suggest how long these places
like banks, gyms, things like that, bakeries, should be shut down?
- Yeah. We're not epidemiologists so we are trying to provide
a more economic framework about how these businesses should be reopened.
What our research suggests is that you should consult with epidemiologists
who are the best position to decide if it's safe to reopen or not.
And once, let's say, they do say that it's safe to reopen certain places,
then we can tell them which places should go first and which ones should go later.
- I also read that your research was --
you advised Governor Cuomo in New York, based on your research,
so tell me what that experience was like and New York, I mean,
has done a lot better in handling COVID, and decreasing the number of deaths
in the state, they're leading right now, so tell me about that experience,
just being able to use the data to advise Governor Cuomo and his administration.
- Yeah, so just a correction, we didn't directly advise Governor Cuomo,
but we were helping some of the consultants who were
working with Governor Cuomo and following up with these
reopening strategies.
New York was one of the leader in terms of deciding which places should go
in which phases of reopening, you know, Phase 1, Phase 2, Phase 3, and Phase 4.
And they came up with this framework which is basically risk versus reward
of various locations, so that's basically very similar to what we proposed.
What we suggest policymakers is that they should use data to make
these decisions of which places should go first and which places should go later.
While New York has not specified how they came up with these decisions,
of reopening ordering, they seem to have followed pretty much transitions
similar to what we proposed, and it would be great if
policymakers across the country are more transparent and
tell why they're deciding this place should be open first before others.
And it would be great if they used data to guide these decisions
rather than intuitions or even various business interests and others.
- Sure. And just basic intuition, right?
- Yeah, yeah, exactly, yeah.
- Yeah. Tell me how important the mobile phone data is
in just pinpointing locations.
I know there's some places across the globe, mainly in Asia,
that have used that kind of data to help pinpoint target locations
and basically hotspots.
So tell me in your research, how important that was?
- We got access to a really rich data set,
about over 50 million mobile phones in the US.
It's aggregated at a location level so, in order to preserve privacy,
we don't look at individual users' location data, but rather we look at
various locations and how many people were there at that location at a certain
point of time, and how much time do people spend at these locations,
- Sure. - And where do these people come from,
and that data was super useful for us to come up with a risk matrix of locations.
So basically what we do is look at various locations,
look at the square footage of these locations and count
the number of people who were in that location at a certain point of time.
We look at the "density" of that location.
So the CDC for example recommends that you maintain a proper six foot
distance from others in order to minimize COVID transmission,
but oftentimes at some of these locations like for example liquor stores,
they're quite small, densely crowded when people are out there to purchase
and it's just not possible to maintain that distance at many of these locations.
We use that data to come up with our risk matrix,
and we also look at how far people travel to go to a certain location,
and also what's the demographic composition of visitors of these
locations for example, and our research shows that people who
are older are more vulnerable to COVID so some of these
older people have to go to grocery stores, for example.
We use that as well to come up with our risk.
- Well I know it's hard for scientists to predict what things will look like
going forward and in the future but now that we're at the place
we're in in the US and with cases continuing to go up,
what can you say about what we should do?
I mean obviously people should wear masks, but how do you
think things will look in the next several months?
With schools, especially universities, reopening and secondary schools
reopening and K through 12 schools reopening in school districts
all across the state, how could you advise how to address
the next several months and just reducing the number of cases?
- I wish there was an easy answer to that question, but unfortunately
what we find with our data is that for example, many of the locations
which we say should be closed first before others, even if they weren't
actually closed by policymakers, people stop going to those locations.
What we find is that people walk with their feet and if there is
a higher risk of transmitting COVID at a certain location,
then they stop going to those places.
What that says is that it's basically we need to fight the virus,
and it's not the lockdown which is causing reduction in economic activity,
but rather it's the virus itself.
As long as we don't conquer COVID and as long as we don't flatten the curve
it's just, you know, even if you open places, people are not
going to go to those places and economy won't get back on track.
I think one way forward to decide what to do in the future is to do
regular surveys of people in order to gauge their confidence in terms
of how confident do they feel, you know, their location is
in terms of handling COVID and if places do reopen,
are they willing to go and participate in economic activities?
I have also some ongoing research right now were we're running
lots of large-scale surveys in partnership with Facebook
where we're surveying thousands of people we are really asking them basically,
"If these places reopen will you go and visit them?"
Let's say the places reopen but with certain mitigation strategies
such as like compulsory masks or some of these plexiglass screens,
at cashiers, if you have those prevention tools in place,
would you go then or not?
I think we need to get more real-time data,
which will help policymakers make better decisions.
- Sure. Well today we've been talking with Avi Collis,
he is Assistant Professor in our IROM department
new to the McCombs School of Business.
We've been talking about his new piece of research
and his paper titled "Rationing Social Contact During the COVID-19 Pandemic:
"Transmission, Risk, and Social Benefits of US Locations".
Thank you so much Avi, thank you for your time
and this has been a great talk today so thank you so much for joining us
on our Big Ideas Show.
- Yeah thanks Catenya, thanks for having me.
- You're welcome.
Thank you for watching we will see you next time.