  Covid-19 has had a disastrous economic impact on countries and industries as
countries have gone through the lockdown process to reduce the health impact of
Covid-19. As countries have started lifting Covid-19 related restrictions,
businesses have been allowed to again have on-site customers. However, just a
limited number of people are being allowed on-site as long as social distancing
measures are being followed. This has resulted in heavy burdens on businesses
as their number of customers have decreased substantially. In this study, we
propose a model to minimize the economic impact of Covid-19 for businesses that
have implemented social distancing measures, as well as to minimize the health
impact of Covid-19 for their customers and employees. We introduce the quantity
Spread in which minimizing Spread gives the optimum number and arrangement of
people at a given site while applying social distancing measures. We apply our
model to a real-world scenario and optimize the number of passengers and their
arrangements under a social distancing measure for two different popular
aircraft seat layouts using the Annealing Monte Carlo technique. We obtain the
optimal numbers and optimal arrangements of passengers considering both family
groups and individual passengers for the social distancing measure. The
obtained optimal arrangements of passengers show complex patterns with groups
and individual passengers mixed in complex and non-trivial ways. This
demonstrates the necessity of using our model or its variants to find these
optimal arrangements. In addition, we show that any other arrangements of
passengers with the same number of passengers is a suboptimal arrangement with
higher health risks as a result of less distance between passengers. Our model
could be implemented for other social situations such as sports events,
theaters, medical centers, etc.
