Is a Pandemic the Right Time to Start a Business? It Just Might Be

In March, as small businesses across the country were shutting down amid the spreading coronavirus pandemic, Shanel Fields was about to open one up.

For Ms. Fields, the timing couldn’t have been better. Her company, MD Ally, allows 911 dispatchers and other responders to route nonemergency calls and patients to virtual doctors, to help local governments improve their emergency response systems.

“Something that a lot of people don’t know is that more than half of calls that go to 911 are nonemergency,” said Ms. Fields, whose father’s experiences as a volunteer emergency medical worker sparked the idea. “Those nonemergency calls overcrowd E.R.s and delay ambulances.”

But she also recognizes how crazy it sounds to start a business during an economic collapse. She knows that while she’s hiring, many small businesses are worrying about whether they’ll ever reopen. She’s not alone: New businesses are forming despite the pandemic, though at a significantly slower rate than before.

There have been more than 500,000 applications for an employer identification number since mid-March, according to the Census Bureau, although that is down nearly 20 percent from a year ago. Between mid-March and mid-April, the Small Business Administration issued nearly 300 start-up loans worth about $153 million, a 36 percent drop from year earlier. Stripe, the credit card processing firm, said it had handled more than $1 billion in sales for businesses that started on the platform during that time.

Past downturns produced some high-profile American companies: Airbnb, Disney, General Motors, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, Slack, Uber and Venmo, to name a few.

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