LPRC - CrimeScience – The Weekly Review – Episode 74 with Dr. Read Hayes, Tom Meehan & Tony D’Onofrio

Episode Date: September 18, 2021

First Responders are feeling the Effects of Covid! LPRC IMPACT is Oct 5th to 6th Virtually! In this week’s episode, our co-hosts discuss these topics and more, including Vacation Vaccinations, Third Doses of Pfizer being Administered, and Online Worldwide Activity Numbers are Collected. Listen in to stay updated on hot topics in the industry and more! The post CrimeScience – The Weekly Review – Episode 74 with Dr. Read Hayes, Tom Meehan & Tony D’Onofrio appeared first on Loss Prevention Research Council.

Hi, everyone, and welcome to Crime Science. In this podcast, we explore the science of crime and the practical application of this science for loss prevention and asset protection practitioners, as well as other professionals. We would like to thank Bosch for making this episode possible. Take advantage of the advanced video capabilities offered by Bosch to help reduce your shrink risk. Integrate video recordings with point-of-s sale data for visual verification of transactions and exception reporting. Use video analytics for immediate notification of important AP related events and leverage analytics metadata for fast forensic searches for evidence and to

improve merchandising and operations. Learn more about extending your video system beyond simple surveillance in zones one through four of LPRC's zones of influence by visiting Bosch online at boschsecurity.com. Welcome everybody to another episode of Crime Science the podcast. This is the latest in our weekly update series from the LPRC and I'm joined by Tony D'Onofrio and by Tom Meehan and our producer Diego Rodriguez And we're going to kind of go around the world and discuss updates that are relevant to the LPRC membership and the retail industry and others at large. Talk a little bit about the global pandemic that just doesn't seem to want to go away. Quite a few reports, increasing reports of first responder deaths from COVID-19 disease. In the case of law enforcement officers surpassing even deaths by vehicle accidents, as well as on the job violence from shooting or knifing or other health effects.

So just kind of a tragic outcome there. And other news, you know, it was reported over in Guam that they have set up a way to continue to get some tourism, and they're calling it Airbnb, or in other words, vaccination and vacation. And so the idea is, again, particularly with the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines that people can come into Guam, they get their first vaccine dose, they continue their vacation and somewhat quarantine, but yet a beautiful environment, evidently. And then when it's time for the next dose, they get that. They're there for another day or so and head back. So, you know, if there's a way that people are going to find it.

So Airbnb, I thought that was kind of interesting. You know, the masking front, we've talked a lot about cutting viral particle emission. The particles are what infect us, others. It's how the virus moves and a new massive very massive randomized controlled trial showing that surgical masks not necessarily n95 respirator mask for and not cloth mask to provide a pretty profound or significant reduction in viral particle emission and infection of those around so just further evidence the cloth mask seems to be pretty mixed to low as far as a protection. And then again, the N95 is sort of the gold standard in that way.

So masking is still an issue. There's a lot of research around children and masking that continues to emerge the good, around children and masking that continues to emerge, the good, the bad, the not so good about that, particularly with those under the age of three that while it can provide protection if it's a for real mask, but a little bit of cloth probably doesn't. And what are the health benefits versus the trauma that the child is experiencing as well as those around them as the child fusses on aircraft and other public areas. So I know that I'm reading a lot about airlines looking at how they adjust their masking policy and how they handle travelers that have very small children in that way so that everybody's accommodated. that way so that everybody's accommodated um you know seems to be some controversy in all different sources i'm reading um around the um biden administration plan for uh boosters that there while there's evidence and we see israel and other places uh gearing up and in fact uh a wide scale

booster vax vaccine boosters being given um that top fda and c FDA and CDC officials are not so sure because they want to move with the science. And in fact, evidently, two or maybe even more top FDA officials that are experts in the vaccine epidemiological area have tendered their resignation saying that the administration is way ahead of the science. So we'll have to see. I'm personally aware of a handful of people now that have gotten a third Pfizer dose. And so it's evidently happening. I didn't really even realize it was official in the United States yet, but it evidently is in some areas. So in the state of Florida, there are people that are administering the third dose. We see that the interesting, I guess, antiviral therapies

underway, a lot of testing, in one case, Brazilian viper venom, and that showing it reduces replication, viral replication by 75%. Now we're looking at mice models, not humans, so it's not reached human clinical trial level, but there are numerous, numerous different antivirals and monoclonal antibodies and others that are showing good evidence. Not really weighing in on the ivermectin. We've discussed it before.

It's very unclear beyond one particularly rigorous trial exactly what the effects might be as far as from a positive standpoint. And again, our family has been in the cattle business for generations, and we do use that as well as other anti-parasitics for what we call warming the cattle, the beef cattle. But so stay tuned on that as more comes out. The variants, we're now hearing a lot about the mu variant and that this may have arisen or first discovered sequenced in the South American area. sequenced in the South American area. Now, as almost every state is now reporting it, even though still the Delta variant seems to account for 90 to 99% of sequenced viral particles that are out there from the infected people that are being treated where they are able to sequence. So that seems to be very dominant. The Mu variant early indications are it could be even a little more

skilled at avoiding some of the mechanisms that vaccines of all types create. Normal, this is normal, but we got to stay tuned and hope and pray that we're not getting more aggressive, which the mu looks like it's a very aggressive as far as transmissibility in the way that the Delta variant is, but hopefully it's not better at breakthrough. On the vaccination front now, amazing 2.2 billion humans and growing daily, hourly have now been completely and fully vaccinated according to one or two dose regimens, almost all or two dose other than J&J. In the United States now, just over 178 million people have been fully vaccinated, which is now just surpassed 75% of adult Americans have been fully vaccinated. And then overall, though, 208, almost 210 million Americans have been at least partially vaccinated at this point. So vaccinations do continue.

And I can see around here in Gainesville, a lot of the students and others getting vaccinated that had not considered it before. Now, a lot of it's because the Pfizer vaccine, as we know, the BioNTech, has been fully FDA approved after reviewing all the phase one, two, and three data, the follow-up data, and then looking at the different advisory outside advisory panels, the FDA and CDC. So it looks like Moderna is shortly thereafter. Looking at, there are now 102 other vaccine candidates in human clinical trials, additionally 75 incremental anti-COVID-19 vaccines in preclinical. So 177 known vaccine candidates being trialed

out there. I think the Novavax one is the one that we've all been talking and thinking about has now been approved elsewhere overseas. Looks like in the next 60 days, 90 days, that that's very possible. It's a different mechanism of action than the mRNA or the J&J vaccine. And so we then, if that does become the case, we'd have three different types of modes and mechanisms of action for the anti-COVID-19 vaccines. So fairly exciting there. Phase one, there are 53 candidates. Phase two, human trials, 45 different vaccines. And in phase three trials, now 33. We know that there are additionally worldwide 13 that have emergency use authorization. And then there are now eight fully approved COVID-19 vaccines out there.

We had some new research showing that, you know, we talked a lot about infection reduction. And then additionally, of course, disease severity reduction are the two goals that the current vaccines were designed to reduce disease severity, the replication and the effects that based on our immune response or lack thereof, or at least the replication speed and the seriousness of the symptoms that we experience all the way up to fatalities. So again, further showing though with the additional Pfizer booster

that does look like it not only increases the vaccine individuals vulnerability to very severe disease and hospitalization, particularly ICU or worse, but also is looking like it's reducing infection risk as well. Again, Pfizer's got some therapies, two different oral therapies that are in clinical trials. Another set of research that I looked at were the idea that there are medical exemptions from being vaccinated. And these sources, particularly one reported by NBC News, is indicating that a lot of the research is showing that there's actually nobody that they can find, according to all the research and experts that they queried, that could find a legitimate medical exemption reason for not being vaccinated other than known to be allergic to that particular vaccine. And so I thought that was particularly interesting because we hear about some people with different, you know, compromised situations and so on.

So stay tuned if there's more definition, you know, we'll bring it up on this podcast. But the idea that there's really no medical reason not to be vaccinated was particularly interesting. We've also got looking at some of the other vaccinations or research on vaccinations. Vax still have a lower susceptibility than non-vax to serious disease. So there's a whole bunch more randomized controlled trials that are starting to emerge as well as other secondary data analyses. We're looking at immunity, natural versus vaccinated. And we're looking at immunity, natural versus vaccinated. We've heard that there is growing research evidence that indicates that it might be that natural infection, those that recover, may have as much or in a lot of cases, even more immunity to serious disease than those that are vaccinated, which would not be unusual. It just depends from what I've been reading on the virus or the pathogen itself. And so it's interesting to see, though, I know one person that had natural disease,

got fully vaccinated and then got the COVID-19 again, but it was not very severe, very mild cold-like symptoms. So this is know, this is a crazy, crazy virus, and it just seems pretty resistant to whatever, but overall seems to be good. News out of Israel that they are now working on a fourth dose as they race to provide third doses to their population, starting with 60 and over, and now 50 and over, and continues. But the fourth dose they're looking at, evidently engineering it to adapt to the new variants, Delta, Mu, and anything else that they're picking up on or others are sequencing around the world. So this could be, again, just like we've talked about RSV, influenza, and many, many, many, many other viruses become endemic or be here. It's just a

matter of what are the ways we can find to reduce the probability of serious disease for so many people as we close in on 650,000 Americans that have died from COVID-19. So it's definitely more fatal than the other viruses that we're dealing with normally, coronaviruses and other types of colds and flu and RSV and so on. So that's what I've got from that front, LPRC front, more going in in our Safer Places Lab at the University of Florida. We're looking at some partners and working on some of those partnerships, working on use cases in the field that I mentioned before. So just a whole lot happening across the board there. Working groups from A&Strong will continue to work or have those up until we don't normally have them in December.

And look for also with LPRC Impact, of course, as we announced, would be fully virtual content and platform rehearsals, dry runs with the platform, with the logistics, the process. We've got at least 20 people coming into Gainesville that are on our committee, on our annual LPRC Impact planning team. They'll be in here to help us pull this off. And so we're going to try to provide the most unique virtual experience that we possibly can. So we'll continue to put more out on social media, on our website, and on this podcast. So we're excited about it, and we hope you all are too. So with no further ado, let me go over to Tony D'Onofrio. And Tony, if you can take it away. Thank you very much, Reed. Again, good updates on both LPRC and what's happening with COVID. So let me start with some data this week in terms

of what's happening on the internet every minute in 2021. So this is the latest data in terms of what we're all doing online in 2021. And this data is from the World Economic Forum and Statista. So every minute, 28,000 subscribers are watching Netflix. 695,000 stories are shared on Instagram. 91 plus connections are made on LinkedIn. 69 million text messages are sent. There are 5,000 downloads of TikTok.

$1.6 million is spent every minute shopping online. Nearly 198 million emails are sent. I thought emails are dead, but they're not. We're almost at 200 million a minute emails going out. And then 500 hours of content that are uploaded on YouTube. That's an amount, vast amount of data that gets processed. And it reminds me again that we're generating a lot more data in the last few years versus the entire history, just based on all this stuff going online and what the Internet has done. One of the drivers of the Internet is e-commerce. And where is e-commerce growing the fastest?

And this, again, is from Statista. So worldwide e-commerce will grow to $4.2 trillion by 2025, up 47%. Asia will lead the way, up growing 51% to $2.6 trillion. China is the number one online market. In 2020, they had retail sales online of $1.3 trillion, and they'll grow 49% to nearly $2 trillion. That's an amazing number by 2025. Our shop, North America is actually small in comparison. North America is a $588 billion market e-commerce in 2020, and it's going to grow 35% to $795 billion by 2021. Again, to give you a comparison, $2 trillion versus $795 billion by 2025. Europe is even smaller at 460 million, but they're growing faster at 42% to 656 billion by 2025.

Worth noting that both North America and Europe are lagging the rest of the world in online e-commerce growth. So the global average is 47%. Again, both Europe and North America are behind that. percent again both Europe and North America are behind that. So on the fun part since I am Italian one of the funny ones that came across this week again from Statista is which country regularly eats pasta in 2021. So can you guess number one? Well number one would be Italy. So 86% of Italians eat pasta regularly. Number two is France, 80%. Number three is UK, 72%. US is up there, actually. 62% of USA folks eat pasta regularly. And number five is Germany at 61%. And let me end this week in a more serious technology note. IHL recently published their top 10 touchless trends to watch in 2021.

So number one is optimizing customer journeys. And so the margins point losses for retailers range anywhere from 4.2 to 8.2% for all those new services such as buy online, pick up and store or local delivery from store. So think what I just said. They actually have a margin decline in that range every time they use one of these services. So they're very expensive and retailers need to optimize to actually make money, especially if you think about grocery, which has a very low margin to begin with.

Number two trend is simplified checkouts. Retailers that have self-checkout installs saw sales that were 18% higher than average for 2020. 2020. In the food, drug, and mess merchants for the next two years, self-checkout is going to grow 178 percent. Consumer mobile checkout will go 300 percent, and contactless payments will grow 190 percent. Number three touchless trend is electronic shelf labels. Public companies plan to expand their installs of electronic shop labels by 600%. Number four is pickup lockers. Customers who picked up their purchases from a pickup locker or tower rated their overall customer experience 25% higher than when the pickup required human intervention. So we like to engage with machines, not with people.

Number five, touchless strand is associate and manager mobile devices. Mobile devices already provided by the company or the store are already in the hands of managers for 32% of food, drug, C-stores, and mass merch, 43% of general merchandise retailers, and 39% of hospitality. All that will grow to 50% plus adoption in the next 12 months. And that's important because those mobile devices are what we're going to send exception data so the manager has real-time data in their hands inside stores. 18% of food, drugs, e-stores, and mass merchant store associates also carry a store-provided mobile device. For GMS, general merchandise, it's an amazing 40% that carry a mobile device. And for hospitality, it's 21%. The sixth touchless trend is second location in-store.

A second location in-store for micro-fulfillment of online orders are going to grow 700% over the next two years. Number seven is dark stores. To fulfill online orders only, so these are stores that really are stores, but they're actually only doing online orders, but closer to neighborhoods, they're going to grow 966% over the next two years. as anybody growing 15% or more the previous year, are 214 more likely to invest in voice recognition technology for order picking and or inventory. Number nine trend is optimized inventory. The problem of inventory distortion is an amazing 1.8 trillion. 81% of the problem is out of stocks, 19% is over stocks, and the 10th touchless trend for 2021 is new tech architecture. By that means it's retailers are finding different ways to configure technology, and edge computing is becoming one of those critical areas. areas. Edge computing is going to grow 533% over the next two years, and microservices architecture will grow 208% over the next two years. All great technology to comply with,

keep attention that opens up to new ways to steal, and also keeping track of those good and green and red shoppers and test those concepts at the LPRC. And with that, let me turn it over to Tom. Thank you, Tony. Thank you, Reid. A lot of great stuff covered. And I actually got traveled internationally. And so very interesting.

I was in four different countries to see how they responded to COVID. The one thing I would say is, I know Tony has traveled internationally as well as all of the airports, even very small, obscure airports in Europe had on-site COVID testing. So I thought it was really interesting. Certainly very confusing at this time traveling in Europe because a lot of the rules were changing as I was there, but kind of felt like flying around the US that we didn't have it as down pat as they did. I just thought it was interesting. I wanted to just briefly touch on some of the weather events that, you know, I live in the Northeast and we had the most rain in 100 years, eight inches of rain in four and a half hours. So I was flooded and I already have

received some emails that are scam emails around fraud. So just reminding people that the malicious folks and the nefarious actors out there are immediately taking advantage. So if you see an email like that, just to double check it. Another thing is it's a good reminder, and I know we talk about the FusionNet, to look at what weather apps you can use so they can get up-to-date information. My favorite weather app is MyRadar Pro, but there are a lot of different ones. And I know Reid and I have exchanged things before of getting that up-to-date information

so that you can be as prepared as possible. I wanted to just give a quick update on the T-Mobile hack. I thought there was a really good piece in the Wall Street Journal that I thought made sense to talk about because we've talked about it a couple of times in the past. And this was actually the Wall Street Journal conversing with the hacker. His name is John Binns, and he is actually an American-born Turkish native that moved back to Turkey. And he's having a full conversation with the journal about how he did it. And in the message, he actually talks about how he found an unprotected router that gave him access to hundreds of servers and how terrible in his words, he said the security was awful. He said he was panicked when he saw how much

information he had gotten into so quickly. And it's a really good read, but it really talks to kind of the prolific events that are occurring and how in some of these, some countries, these folks are outwardly okay with identifying who they are. I firmly believe that the U.S. government will attempt to extradite it and go after this. But it was interesting that when he spoke, the Wall Street Journal has a bunch of quotes. He said, I really want to generate noise. That was his goal. He actually didn't, according to his words, have the goal of selling the information.

But when he got the information and saw what it was, he went and saw it. He did not say whether or not he had actually sold any. He just said that that wasn't his original intent. But really, really interesting read and really talked very specifically to, he initially targeted T-Mobile and then basically went for a softer target. He said when he was inside and found this router that was vulnerable to an attack, which then gave him access to hundreds of servers. And he actually has screenshots of some of their messages and some of the screenshots of actually

the T-Mobile warning messages. So this is not really about T-Mobile. This is what I often say is that, you know, all of us commercially and personally are vulnerable to hacking events and we just have to do our best to keep our due diligence. But it's a good reminder to make sure that, you know, you have everything that you can patch and update to do that and make sure that if you have older equipment in your house, when I say older, five years or longer, that you make sure that if you have older equipment in your house, when I say older, five years or longer, that you make sure that default passwords are changed.

Switching gears a little bit, I talked a little bit on last week's call about the U.S. government meeting with tech leaders and coming up with a plan and everybody talking about what they did best and kind of collaboratively working together like we do here at the LPRC. There was another kind of update, which is related, but not really related, where tech, big tech industries are asking, you know, to play a greater role in defense. Typically the military and probably the most two most great examples are GPS and internet. The military really created them. Typically the military likes to create the technology and then follow the commercial aspects here.

But what the premise of this kind of pushes, and this dates back to 2018, but it has been aggressively brought up, is that the U.S. government needs to not only work collaboratively to share information, but potentially contract out to some of the big tech companies in the U.S., some of the technology that's there versus taking everything in-house.

And, you know, Robert Wark, who is the former U.S. Secretary of Defense, talks about in a couple of different articles, he's very often talking about this, that we're in competition with China from a technology standpoint, and we're not organized to win the competition. And he made the comment, we're not organized to win the competition. And if we don't correct that, we're doomed to lose. And this came up again, again, in a couple of weeks where this came out that there isn't, or there wasn't, I shouldn't say, there wasn't a roadmap really laid out to how to not only the defense, but the utilities infrastructure in the U.S. And this kind of leads me back to the T-Mobile. If you read that Wall Street Journal article, you can see the

screenshots. And you can, if you're a technical person, identify very quickly that some of the screenshots allude to the software is 20 to 25 years old because the screenshots are in green screen or mainframe. So this was a big push about this is strictly for defense and utilities, but it really leads to all of us. So the push to really rapidly look at taking that balance of cost and protection and coming up with a narrative that makes sense to protect ourselves. And I'll leave the, turn it back over to Reed in just one second. And while I was traveling this week, I actually traveled during the storm and I leaned over and I was talking to an agent who had a screen up and this is one of the major airlines and I'm

looking at the screen and immediately what I see is that they're in a screen rebooking my flights in a mainframe. And I'm thinking to myself, one of the largest airlines in the world has software that was written probably in 1982. And what does that mean from a vulnerability standpoint? And literally watching someone, it reminded me of when I was in school of learning, watching someone that I'm quite certain was written in school of learning uh watching someone that i'm quite certain was written in cobalt uh in the 80s and thinking the one of the largest airlines what the risk is for them and then also understanding the daunting task both from a resource and a cost to update it so i'm not minimizing the upgrade but it just kind of brings full circle of how vulnerable we are in the U.S.

from utilities, defense, and airline industry. Obviously, when you think of that, you don't want people messing with planes. You don't want people messing with your utilities. You certainly don't want people messing with your defense systems. And sorry for all the doom and gloom, but I'm going to turn it back over to Reid. Yeah, one more thing to think about. So thank you so much, Tom, for that and all the information. Same to you, Tony. So again, please, lpresearch.org is the website, and so it would be operations at lpresearch.org with your questions, your comments, your suggestions. We're excited about LPRC Impact coming up that 5th and 6th of October.

Go to the website, lpresearch.org, to register, get you and your team involved, engage with us. We're going to have Strategy At, and there may be more than one again this year. The Strategy At is for the VPs of asset protection, loss prevention, and they're number twos. In other words, they're people that are up and coming. They're bench strength. We've got Ignite coming up. We've got Kickoff and so forth. So we've got a series of really cool events going on in addition to Impact, which is the big one, the big, big one for us. So let us know what you need and think. Everybody, please stay safe, have fun, and stay tuned. From Gainesville,presearch.org. The content provided in the Crime Science Podcast is for informational purposes only and is not a substitute for legal, financial, or other advice.

Views expressed by guests of the Crime Science Podcast are those of the authors and do not reflect the opinions or positions of the Loss Prevention Research Council.