More than half of U.S. small businesses will close within three months if the coronavirus crisis is not solved.
Goldman Sachs surveyed more than 1,500 small-business owners over March 16-17, according to Axios. The survey focused on small-business owners’ ability to survive the economic downturn caused by the coronavirus.
More than half, 51%, said that they would close their business within three months if the pandemic is not largely solved, and 96% said they have already felt the economic impact of the health crisis. Three-quarters of business owners said they have already seen a noticeable drop in sales. 53% said their employees cannot telework, and just 13% of business owners expressed confidence in their plans to weather the crisis.
The Small Business Administration, which defines a small business as one with less than 500 employees, found that small businesses employed 58.9 million people and were responsible for 47.5% of jobs in the United States in 2018.
Companies began mass furloughs and layoffs earlier this week preparing for a significant drop in business as people isolate themselves and commerce slows. The survey’s results suggest that officials and experts will likely be forced to weigh the additional benefit of slowing the disease’s progress against economic losses in vast swaths of the U.S. economy.
“We have to give due seriousness to this disease breaking out across the globe,” said Nicholas Evans, a philosophy professor at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. “At the same time, we have to think about equity and the way the risks and benefits of measures we take are distributed.”
Marriott International, the largest hotel chain in the world, employees 175,000 people globally, including 130,000 in the U.S., and plans to furlough tens of thousands of those employees in response to the coronavirus. The health crisis has hit the travel and hotel industries especially hard as people cancel travel and vacation plans in large numbers to cut down the risk of contracting or spreading the disease.
