LPRC - CrimeScience – The Weekly Review – Episode 76 with Dr. Read Hayes, Tom Meehan & Tony D’Onofrio

Episode Date: October 20, 2021

Covid Boosters are Approved! 85% of people said Covid Affected their Shopping Habits! In this week’s episode, our co-hosts discuss these topics and more, including identifying Podcast Popularity based on Country, Government Infrastructure Cyber Attacks are Defined, and Retail Therapy trends this year. Listen in to stay updated on hot topics in the industry and more! The post CrimeScience – The Weekly Review – Episode 76 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 LPRC's Crime Science, the podcast. This is the latest in our weekly update series. I'm joined by colleagues Tony D'Onofrio and Tom Meehan and our producer Diego Rodriguez. and we're going to go ahead and roll right into this. We'll first start of course with the COVID-19 pandemic and talk a little bit about that. It looks like there are now on the vaccine front 2.6 billion humans that have now been vaccinated globally. The vaccination pace continues to increase around the world with

hundreds of millions of vaccines, doses being donated by Western countries, if you will, or those that are manufacturing, even India now, who at first was total export of vaccines, realized that that probably wasn't the best move since they needed to save quite a few of those for their own citizens and suffered dearly for that. Turn that around. They produced enough vaccine for their own people and now have gone back to exporting as well. So that's good news for the entire world. It's the right thing to do. And of course, it's the best way to suppress this virus as much as possible is vaccination. According to all the scientific evidence that's out there so far, which is pouring in, the United States now, just about 190 million Americans have been vaccinated,

fully vaccinated. And so we see that that's moving. There's evidence, according to surveys, that a major reason is the Delta variant, that so many people that before were hesitant to become vaccinated now realize that this is, in fact, a very communicable or transmissible virus, and that it's taking a lot of people out, a lot of suffering and death, a lot of overcrowding in hospitals, a lot of forcing people not to get procedures because there's no room for them or they've shut down that area to take care of COVID patients. So we just heard the news of a particular celebrity who had a false positive test. Her husband, a surgeon, then had to preclude going into surgery, which is pretty dramatic for those patients that desperately need it. And so that's just one microcosm or look at that.

We see that there are still now 105 vaccines in clinical or human trials, with 54 being in phase one, 47 in phase two, 35 in the very extensive exhaustive phase three trials, 35 candidates. We've got 13 emergency use authorization level vaccines, and of course, eight fully approved, including the Pfizer and Moderna and the J&J here in the United States. We've got 75 additional vaccine candidates in preclinical. And again, we've talked a lot about there are at least eight that would be orally administered instead of injected. Those are in different phases of evaluation. And so that continues. phases of evaluation. And so that continues. We talked about before the amount of rigorous research that goes on for these vaccines and the fact that these have gone through, particularly the two mRNA, the Pfizer-BioNTech and the Moderna versions, the most exhaustively tested viral vaccines known to date, just the sheer number of phase three trials and the number of participants in those trials, the amount of tracking and independent overview of those trials, and then the continued oversight by both the manufacturers, the government agencies, and then outside panels of virologists,

epidemiologists, and other physician scientists. So these still appear to be, again, safe and effective. And with this number of humans going on at some point pretty soon, 3 billion humans with very few serious after effects. But we're seeing that the disease can be pretty serious for people. And they're learning more and more again about the mechanisms of action of the virus and what the damage is and how it spreads, how it generates the damage that they're seeing. One interesting research paper I saw, or a series of papers now, just talks about the proteins that are generated and leveraged or harnessed by the COVID-19 disease. Again, it's the SARS-CoV-2 virus that once we contract that, the disease is

called COVID-19. The COVID-19 hijacks and does certain things, but there's a combination that they're finding of proteins that are designed to trick our immune system, to convince the immune system that a sick cell is not sick. That allows that sick cell to transmit the virus that it's infected to another adjacent cell or other cells. And instead of having the part of our immune system, the killer T cells and so on, to take that cell out and to do other things. So now you can see where, as they look at therapies, what can be done to neutralize,

to suppress that interaction of those proteins that trick the immune system. So that's what you see with cancer and other diseases that they tricked our immune system in a variety of ways. They literally are veil themselves or they trick and they do all these things. It's just an amazing look into the biology here that's committed by these. We see also that Pfizer, and we've talked about this before, their treatment pill, which is actually designed to be sort of prophylactic or protective right before you may become infected or as you're initially infected. Let's say one of us is quarantined with somebody or had a lot of exposure to an infected person. You might take a combination of this Pfizer pill and another one that is designed, an antiviral, that's been very successful

with HIV. And the two of them combined are inhibiting some of these proteins that we talked about. So it's a protease sort of inhibitor, and that this combination seems to bolster each other and allow for longer effectiveness. And again, what will happen too is some of these, this virus in particular will break down treatments and therapies as well. So they're either not effective, as effective, or if they're effective, don't last as long. So the biology is amazing. And this is when we talk about science is not a thing, it's a process, but the sheer number of brilliant scientists and others working on the issue and what they're finding and learning that are going to help us not only with this virus, but with upcoming and other chronic and acute issues that we have. that we have. We see some of the things that are going on, some people still being reluctant to become vaccinated. In New York, we see that that governor, she replaced the governor that was resigned, I guess, in disgrace. But she has now issued a, it's actually a disaster order,

now issued a, it's actually a disaster order, and that's just activating the Army National Guard, the other National Guard people to go in and take the place of health care workers that are being terminated or suspended if they're not vaccinated against the virus. We're seeing elsewhere that there's part of the information. So we talked about the biology of what's going on. There's also the sociology or the psychosociology of what's going on. And part of this is why do people think that a vaccine or this vaccine or one of the vaccines, remember, there are three different versions out right now, as we just saw, 150 more on the way, why would these vaccines not be effective or even particularly may even be harmful? What's the information? Well, in one case, part of the deep dive is the false narratives that happen and how that information is transmitted viral, if you will.

So in this case, what we're looking at is that the COVID-19 boosters that are being built right now as we speak, some being administered, some of these boosters are designed to attack the Delta specifically, and then other known or suspected like new and so forth that are out there, that that's somehow an indication of the failure of the vaccines. But the data show overwhelmingly the vaccines were very effective, are very effective, and that every time there's been a pandemic and a vaccine is developed, that is the factor that ends up suppressing and either eliminating the virus or making it become endemic or, in other words, low-grade like we see with colds and influenza and so on, where they still could be deadly, but they're almost completely overwhelmingly not deadly or even serious.

So that's what the vaccines do. But the false narrative in this case is that these boosters are indication of failure. But in fact, most times we get a vaccine, it's designed to last for a short period of time. It goes in, it simulates the virus of interest, our immune system, recognizes and responds to it, develops that short-term, medium, and sometimes long-term memory. And so now if we are in fact natively infected by the actual virus, we're ready for it, right? We can quickly recognize, respond, and suppress that normally overwhelmingly. But they're only designed to last for a while. In this case, the virus is so prolific, transmissible around the world, particularly with the Delta variant, that, okay, it goes beyond the expire date or the use by date of four to six or eight months. And so the booster

again, reminds the immune system, reactivates it that, Hey, this is it. Or in the case of upcoming boosters that will simulate again, some of the unique features of the spike protein for the Delta variant and so on. So, you know, stay tuned, but the idea is to read and who you listen to matters. You know, if it's somebody that's a trained virologist or series, they're, they are citing multiple research projects. That's one thing. If it's somebody on Facebook or some other, some other, or somebody on the street corner, that's telling you this or in the coffee shop may or may not, probably not particularly accurate. We've all played telephone or know what the game is where when you spread things around.

So we just all have to be very careful because people's health is at stake and sometimes even their life. And so we want to play it right. The idea of mixing and matching the mRNA vaccines is, of course, still in discussion, still under heavy research. There's some data indicating that might be the way to go. If you got Moderna first, get Pfizer second or vice versa. Or it just doesn't matter that you can get either or, particularly if you forget, or that one's not available when you need it. So that research is still going on. The official guidance looks

to be right now, try not to, but it doesn't say don't. So I'm reading through the literature and seeing if there's anything new, but that seems to be it. J&J, still a puzzle, seems to be highly effective. And so while there's a lot of research going on by the manufacturer and independent groups, the data under review, we've not heard really a whole lot of anything yet officially about what to do. Should there be boosters? And if so, what should they look like? The other part again is who is actually getting sick, whether vaccinated or not. Sometimes it's a mystery. We know underlying conditions, people that are undergoing say chemotherapy that chemotherapy, that are severely obese, and

some other underlying conditions seem to play a large role. And then finally, it looks like that Pfizer and others, it looks like their vaccines are looking to be safe and effective in those that are 5 to 11-year-olds. And so there are evidently millions of parents waiting news to see if they can and should and when they could get their children vaccinated against the SARS-CoV-2 virus. So those are some of the highlights. Maybe it's lowlights, but what's going on, the effects of the virus, how it actually spreads and what the damage it does inside of our

bodies and maybe why and then how these therapies and protective vaccines are designed to work to to preclude infection or to minimize the results of that infection or help us recover once we get the infection so stay tuned we know that there are also hundreds of therapies in study right now as well so pivoting over lprc impact is coming up and next week the team is excited it's been exhaustive amount of work to design and set up the logistics rehearse practice dry runs that are coming up here to pull together the expert panels, to put together the content, get the dynamic interaction between them, get some cool videos of our labs and elsewhere, and pull everything together. So we're excited that next

week, October 5th and 6th, LPRC 2021 version of Impact Conference will be going on. The evidence-based perspective of impact and LPRC overall will be showcased there. We're excited to do it. So again, go to lpresearch.org. There's a lot going on in social media. If you see any of our postings, click register. You can get you and your team as many as you'd like registered. There is no charge for you. We've got an array of amazing, amazing sponsors that are making this all possible to get out the best and brightest to talk about what they're doing to research and affect crime and loss. So stay tuned on that. So with no further ado, I'm going to turn it over to Tony D'Onofrio. And Tony, if you would, please take it away. Thank you very much, Veed. And again, very good update. And I'm looking forward to impact next week. I think it's one of the highlights of

the year. And really, everyone should be signing up and joining us. Let me build on what you said earlier, in terms of how we're doing and from statistics that I just published a summary of regional population that are fully vaccinated as of September 21st, 2021. So then I know where Europe actually leads the world with 51% of its population fully vaccinated. North America follow was 46%. South America is at 38%. Asia is at 35%. Oceania, which includes Australia and New Zealand, is at 29%. And very last and amazingly low is Africa, which is at 4%. Worldwide, 32% of the global population is fully vaccinated, again, as of September 21, 2021. The major gap in places like Africa are a problem because that may lead to more variants,

as we've talked about on this podcast, that could be a challenge. I can tell you I'm actually in Canada today. I'm in Toronto, and it was not easy to get here. I mean, if you don't closely scrutinize the rules and how to travel, what forms you need, and when do you fill the forms, and which test, and when do you need to test, it can be very challenging. Unless you're a professional traveler, actually traveling can be a challenge. And I did not know actually till the middle of the night that my PCR test actually went through and I could travel, which was a totally different test than what the United States requires. So we're still dealing with COVID, but the world moves on just like impact. And so we need to get going.

So let me switch to another interesting piece of information. I did not know that September 30th is actually International Podcast Day, which celebrates this digital broadcasting format that's become popular in different parts of the world. So again, Sazisto did a summary in terms of where it's most popular. And the number one country where it's most popular podcast is Sweden, where they have 50. They actually they're in first place in terms of more than 40 percent of the population actually listens to podcasts. They're actually a 47 percent. Surprisingly, even Brazil is more than 40 percent listening to podcasts. even Brazil is more than 40% listening to podcast. For USA, it's 34% of us that listen to podcast, 31% in the UK. China, it's only 19%. And Japan, again, a very advanced economy, it's only 5% that listen to podcast. Really pleased that this podcast has reached 75 plus episodes and we keep

growing with you. But it's interesting to see how the world in some parts of the world they're still catching up to the format and to me this medium is very very important and in fact even silicon valley recognizes it and they're coming up with new variations with the latest being clubhouse which is picked up millions and millions of subscribers that participate in that format. So we will continue to deliver the news through this podcast. And then I want to share some of the insightful statistics from COVID-19 and retail. This was actually from blog Gun Tech Pigeon, which listed their top 100 most insightful retail statistics.

You should not ignore. I'm only going to pick a few because there's too many to go to. And I would encourage you to actually go find some of the stuff. So let's start with COVID-19 retail statistics. About 85% of Americans have said that COVID impacted their shopping habits. has said that COVID impacted their shopping habits. In some way it includes reduced overall spending, increased online shopping, and increased use of delivery services.

In Europe and across all retail categories, the average items for orders have grown 60% during the pandemic. In Europe again, the average order value has gone up 30%. A third of U.S. shoppers hope to continue ordering online and collecting items in stores after the pandemic ends. American adults are growing increasingly comfortable shopping in stores again, but roughly 81% now willing to go back to in-person shopping. now willing to go back to in-person shopping.

And more than half of shoppers are admitting that even with COVID, they are engaging in retail therapy. So especially for this audience, we need more people to engage in retail therapy. Let's look at some regional trends. Up north, like in Canada, where I'm sitting right now. Although the Canadian retail industry consistently grew from 2012 to 2019, it saw one and a half decrease in 2020 during the pandemic. And this was interesting for this audience. Retail test statistics show that roughly 87.5% of small independent retailer stores are victim of organized retail crime here in Canada.

This costs Canadian retailers $4.6 billion each year. Moving over to the UK, I did not know it was that small, but the retail industry makes up 5% of the UK economy. E-commerce in the UK brings in more money than any other European country. It's the most penetrated, actually, e-commerce market, one of the most penetrated in the world. In Europe, it ranked second. It ranked first, France being second. Moving over to Asia, which is a market that I follow very closely, roughly 40%, 34% of consumers in China like having QR codes on all products

so they can look at them in stores and then make purchases either in the store or online. E-commerce sales in the Pacific are expected to double by 2025. When it comes to customer engagements, three-fourths of customers say they want consistent across all channels while dealing with a brand, while only 25% of customers believe that they can get that consistency. Roughly 86% of customers said they're willing to pay more money for better customer experience. Around 89% of customers report feeling frustrated if they have to repeat their complaint to multiple customer representatives. And statisticians predict that around 40% of all e-commerce sales occurs through mobile devices, and mobile couponing continues to explode, and it will grow more than 50% worldwide. And finally, when it comes to in-store shopping experiences, roughly 87% of shoppers in the U.S.

prefer to shop in stores that have self-checkout and touchless checkout options. More than a third of customers report doing online price comparisons on their mobile phones before walking into stores, making purchases. Roughly 80% of shoppers said they feel good about shopping in stores again. And around 27% of customers say they would like to, they would leave a store and shop at another retail if the product was out of stock. So a lot of great data in terms of how we improve in retail and how would retail evolves in a post pandemic 19 world. And with that, let me turn it over to Tom. Well, thank you, Tony. And thank you, Reid. Always informative and great information. For starters, next week's Impact, right? The virtual Impact is going on. I encourage everybody

to register and sign up who hasn't already. One of my favorite conferences, also one of the best virtual conferences that are out there. So I think you'll be listening to this on the Thursday before Impact comes out. So I encourage everybody to go ahead and register. And I know that virtual conferences have been tough and we're kind of in a position where we've done a lot of them. But I can't encourage or implore you enough to go ahead and register because Impact is a different conference. Just a quick update. I know that we've covered this several times. iOS 14.8, that update that was for iPhones and iPads with a critical vulnerability on the iMessenger attack. I actually am down at GSX in Orlando today taping this and was poking around and talking to people.

And the majority of folks I talked to did not have this update installed. So take the second to go into your settings and go ahead and update that. Don't get confused with, you know, there are a couple different releases at the same time. 14.98 is the security release and then iOS 15, which is the whole new version, was released last week. So I think a lot of people who I talked to were like, oh, I'm not ready to go to 15. I'm waiting to see if there are bugs. And if you don't want to update to 15, that's great. But I think 14.8 is a critical security flaw that actually is being taken advantage of.

So if you haven't had a chance to update it, go ahead and update it. I think it's critical and crucial that you did. Switching gears to some cybersecurity news. In Russia, a top cybersecurity expert was arrested for treason. Again, this is outside the U.S. border, so it's hard to identify exactly what occurred. It's state treason, so the Russian government has picked him up. I believe that some of it is based on some reporting and information that he shared, but he's in custody. He is slotted as a cybersecurity expert, not a bad guy by trade, but I thought it was very interesting. And we talk all the time about this cybersecurity challenges

that are either nation-state sponsored attacks or attacks that occur on foreign nations and some of the risks associated with that. And then some of the political impacts of, in some cases, some of these attacks are literally acts of war against other governments. So when it's proven that a foreign government perpetrates an infrastructure attack, and I think the one that is probably most well-known is the Chinese government attacking the Microsoft Exchange servers. While they have denied doing that, there are multiple reports saying that they are responsible for it,

and not just the Chinese bad actor, but the government itself. That crosses into that area of attack on infrastructure and really, from a geopolitical standpoint, changes the tone of conversations because of that. So I think we'll have some more follow-up. That's fairly new news coming on that topic to really talk about it in a little bit more detail. And then we continue to see legislation in relationship to cybersecurity. And there were two or three bills that went through last week on breach notification and the ramifications of not notifying when there was a breach and some data privacy things that are occurring.

So I continue to see changes. And I do think that will eventually affect retail in the sense that these will trickle down. And in the retail sector, we're not immune to data breaches. And while I think we've had much more restrictive regulatory or not regulatory, but influential by government needs to disclose, I do think there'll be a lot more coming out based on some of these things that are occurring throughout the U.S. and through the world, whether it be the ransomware attacks or the actual straight data breaches where people are coming in and just troves of information are being taken. And I often, and anytime I speak about cybersecurity, I say this is, you know, don't use the word data breach.

Use the word cybersecurity incident because what starts as ransomware can turn into something else or what starts as an intrusion could turn into a loss of data. So that statement that I always make to say, hey, you should use a broader language is because of the fact that there are gray areas in the real world, both from a language standpoint and an actual technical standpoint, that isn't an actual breach or was it an attack where no one got any information? Or some of the more challenging things, yeah, they got information, but the information has no value. So numbers and dates that don't have any PII or PCI compliance challenges still in some cases require notification. And then the person who is a victim of this cyber incident has to go out and explain,

well, someone got into our system. What they got is non-useful information or information that doesn't really cause a threat that's still technically in a breach where data is released. But now you have to really kind of walk that line of explaining it. And I think in today's breaches, to really kind of walk that line of explaining it. And I think in today's breaches, what you often will see is there is a mix match of what actually occurred. Well, was it 100 million records? Was it 37 million records? Was it 20 million records? Was it 1 million records? And that's where that really becomes challenging when you have to release information. So we'll continue to keep an eye on that. And we'll continue to, you know, look at that from a lens of a high level lens to give everybody updates here. And with that, I will turn it back over to Reed. All right. Thanks so much, Tom. Thanks so much, Tony. Great insights, great information. So much is happening and so quickly, but so critically. And it's our role to help bring together what we can. But your role, if you will, as a listener is please keep us informed. Let us know what you need more, less.

Please, questions, comments, suggestions for LPRC's Crime Science the Podcast, just go ahead and reach out to us via our website at lpresearch.org or send us an email at operations at lpresearch.org. So everybody stay safe, stay in touch, and signing off from Gainesville. Thank you. Thanks for listening to the Crime Science Podcast, presented by the Loss Prevention Research Council and sponsored by Bosch Security. If you enjoyed today's episode, you can find more crime science episodes and valuable information at lpresearch.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 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.