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.
