This is what life will look like after the coronavirus pandemic
Jamie Notter, a Washington DC-based workplace culture consultant, thinks it’s possible. “It makes sense to me that if [employees] can work from home and still maintain the same kind of productivity, they’re going to wonder why they [should] come into the office,” he says.
The implications of office workers no longer needing to flood into the centre of cities like London and Manchester every day could be huge. Adam Steel, a senior strategic foresight writer at trend forecaster The Future Laboratory, says that it could even be an opportunity to “reboot suburbia, rural villages and the countryside”.
Simon Gunning, CEO of suicide prevention charity CALM, says that calls to the organisation’s helpline have been “dramatically increasing” throughout the pandemic. His fear is that the mental health impact, and wider social effects, of the outbreak could lead to more suicides. “We know that financial pressures lead to isolation, and then self-medication, and then suicide very often,” he tells me.
What will the knock-on effect of widespread business closures and lay-offs be? What happens when more people than ever are forced to claim benefits? Are we heading for another recession like the 2008 financial crisis? We asked John Bryson, professor of enterprise and economic geography at the University of Birmingham, this final question, and he answered that we were already heading for a recession before the virus began.
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