The Unit­ed States is unpre­pared for the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic giv­en that many work­ers through­out the econ­o­my will have finan­cial dif­fi­cul­ty in fol­low­ing the CDC’s rec­om­men­da­tions to stay home and seek med­ical care if they think they’ve become infect­ed. Mil­lions of U.S. work­ers and their fam­i­lies don’t have access to health insur­ance, and only 30% of the low­est paid work­ers have the abil­i­ty to earn paid sick days — work­ers who typ­i­cal­ly have lots of con­tact with the pub­lic and aren’t able to work from home.

There are defi­cien­cies in paid sick days cov­er­age per sec­tor, par­tic­u­lar­ly among those work­ers with a lot of pub­lic expo­sure. The fig­ure below dis­plays access to paid sick leave by sec­tor. Infor­ma­tion and finan­cial activ­i­ties have the high­est rates of cov­er­age at 95% and 91%, respec­tive­ly. Edu­ca­tion and health ser­vices, man­u­fac­tur­ing, and pro­fes­sion­al and busi­ness ser­vices have low­er rates of cov­er­age, but still main­tain at least three-quar­ters of work­ers with access. Trade, trans­porta­tion, and util­i­ties comes in at 72%, but there are sig­nif­i­cant dif­fer­ences with­in that sec­tor rang­ing from util­i­ties at 95% down to retail trade at 64% (not shown). Over half of pri­vate-sec­tor work­ers in leisure and hos­pi­tal­i­ty do not have access to paid sick days. With­in that sec­tor, 55% of work­ers in accom­mo­da­tion and food ser­vices do not have access to paid sick days (not shown).

Of the pub­lic health con­cerns in the work­force relat­ed to COVID-19, two loom large: those who work with the elder­ly because of how dan­ger­ous the virus is for that pop­u­la­tion and those who work with food because of the trans­mis­sion of ill­ness. Research shows that more paid sick days is relat­ed to reduced flu rates. There is no rea­son to believe con­ta­gion of COVID-19 will be any dif­fer­ent. When over half of work­ers in food ser­vices and relat­ed occu­pa­tions do not have access to paid sick days, the ill­ness may spread more quickly.

What exac­er­bates the lack of paid sick days among these work­ers is that their jobs are already not eas­i­ly trans­fer­able to work­ing from home. On aver­age, about 29% of all work­ers can work from home. And, not sur­pris­ing­ly, work­ers in sec­tors where they are more like­ly to have paid sick days are also more like­ly to be able to work from home. Over 50% of work­ers in infor­ma­tion, finan­cial activ­i­ties, and pro­fes­sion­al and busi­ness ser­vices can work from home. How­ev­er, only about 9% of work­ers in leisure and hos­pi­tal­i­ty are able to work from home.

Many of the 73% of work­ers with access to paid sick days will not have enough days banked to be able to take off for the course of the ill­ness to take care of them­selves or a fam­i­ly mem­ber. COVID-19’s incu­ba­tion peri­od could be as long as 14 days, and lit­tle is known about how long it could take to recov­er once symp­toms take hold. The fig­ure below dis­plays the amount of paid sick days work­ers have access to at dif­fer­ent lengths of ser­vice. Paid sick days increase by years of ser­vice, but even after twen­ty years, only 25% of pri­vate-sec­tor work­ers are offered at least 10 days of paid sick days a year.

The small sliv­er of green shows that a very small share (only about 4%) of work­ers — regard­less of their length of ser­vice — have access to more than 14 paid sick days. That’s just under three weeks for a five-day-a-week work­er, assum­ing they have that many days at their dis­pos­al at the time when ill­ness strikes. The vast major­i­ty of work­ers, over three-quar­ters of all work­ers, have nine days or less of paid sick time. This clear­ly shows that even among work­ers with access to some amount of paid sick days, the amounts are like­ly to be insufficient.

A ver­sion of this post orig­i­nal­ly appeared at the Eco­nom­ic Pol­i­cy Insti­tute.