ESQUIRE: Coronavirus Timeline: How The World Will Change Over The Next 18 Months

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Distance will be the norm at work, too. “I think business travel will go and it will be only when people need to be there: when you need people working in the oil and gas industry to go out and do some work on the rigs in the Gulf,” says Cary Cooper, professor of organisational psychology at Manchester Business School. Our travel-shyness won't just be because we'll see the aviation industry (or whatever form of it survives a three-month shutdown) as a vector for spreading coronavirus around the world. It's also because, after being ordered to work from home, people will realise how much of what normally happens face-to-face can be replaced by technology.

That’ll feed down to rank-and-file workers in the service economy, too. Two years ago, Cooper undertook a study asking about how and why people do or don’t take advantage of the legal right to ask for flexible working from their employer. They found that while women took the option, men didn’t, for fear that it would adversely affect their career. “There was an inhibition, but now there is no inhibition,” Cooper says. “At the moment you’re being forced to work exclusively from home.”