COVID-19 Infection Exposure to Customers Shopping during Black Friday

Abstract: The outbreak of COVID-19 within the last two years has resulted in much further investigation into the safety of large events that involve a gathering of people. This study aims to investigate how COVID-19 can spread through a large crowd of people shopping in a store with no safety precautions taken. The event being investigated is Black Friday, where hundreds or thousands of customers flood stores to hopefully receive the best deals on popular items. A mock store was created, separated into several different shopping sections, and represented using a 2-D grid where each square on the grid represented a 5 feet by 5 feet area of the mock store. Customers were simulated to enter the store, shop for certain items, check out, and then leave the store. A percentage of customers were chosen to be infective when they entered the store, which means that they could spread infection quantum to other customers. Four hours of time was simulated with around 6,000 customers being included. The maximum distance exposure could be spread (2 feet-10 feet), the minimum time of exposure needed to become infected (2 - 15 minutes), and the total percentage of customers who started as infective (1% - 5%) were all changed and their effects on the number of newly infected customers were measured. It was found that increasing the maximum exposure distance by 2 feet resulted in between a 20% to 250% increase in newly infected customers, depending on the distances being used. It was also found that increasing the percentage of customers who started as infective from 1% to 2% and then to 5% resulted in a 200% to 300% increase in newly infected customers.