Economists have long been puzzled at the lack of working-from-home in contexts where it’s easily possible. It makes office politics harder, but that should be a feature, not a bug. It makes it harder to surveil workers, but many companies make a point not to do that anyway even when it’s not hard to do via remote desktop spying.
If the fears about China lying and asymtomatic carriers are correct and it happens that people end up trapped inside for the ~1.5 years it takes to develop a vaccine, a silver lining might be the normalization of working from home. The gains would be quite significant, especially in counties like the USA with a lot of urban areas favored by corporations that have horrible politics around zoning and crime.
Alexander Turok 