Central European University, Budapest, Hungary.
Centre for Economic and Regional Studies, Budapest, Hungary.
PLoS One. 2020 Sep 18;15(9):e0239113. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0239113. eCollection 2020.
Social distancing interventions can be effective against epidemics but are potentially detrimental for the economy. Businesses that rely heavily on face-to-face communication or close physical proximity when producing a product or providing a service are particularly vulnerable. There is, however, no systematic evidence about the role of human interactions across different lines of business and about which will be the most limited by social distancing. Here we provide theory-based measures of the reliance of U.S. businesses on human interaction, detailed by industry and geographic location. We find that, before the pandemic hit, 43 million workers worked in occupations that rely heavily on face-to-face communication or require close physical proximity to other workers. Many of these workers lost their jobs since. Consistently with our model, employment losses have been largest in sectors that rely heavily on customer contact and where these contacts dropped the most: retail, hotels and restaurants, arts and entertainment and schools. Our results can help quantify the economic costs of social distancing.
社交隔离措施对于应对传染病可能是有效的，但对经济可能会产生不利影响。那些在生产产品或提供服务时严重依赖面对面交流或近距离身体接触的企业特别容易受到影响。然而，目前并没有关于不同行业中人类互动的作用以及哪些行业将受到社交隔离限制最大的系统证据。在这里，我们提供了基于理论的衡量美国企业对人类互动依赖程度的指标，这些指标按行业和地理位置详细列出。我们发现，在疫情爆发之前，有 4300 万名员工从事严重依赖面对面交流或需要与其他员工近距离接触的职业。由于疫情，其中许多人已经失业。与我们的模型一致，严重依赖客户接触且这些接触大幅减少的行业（如零售、酒店和餐馆、艺术和娱乐以及学校）的就业损失最大。我们的研究结果可以帮助量化社交隔离的经济成本。
