I had a similar insider story being recounted to me recently about one of the previous worldwide outbreaks (I think it was SARS).
The French administration at large was extremely reluctant to allow remote work, even very occasionally, if at all, purely by policy. Then the outbreak happened and people started calling in sick.
But when you're calling in sick, chances are you've already been contagious, and so the body count started to go way up, until people started asking to work remotely instead because it was obvious their work could be carried remotely and they just did not want to become sick, because it just made sense.
Which was denied. Because policy.
So people started calling in fake sick (sometimes with direct management being complicit) and worked from home anyway. And then upper management realised that... it worked! People that were marked as sick (but were not, this was a thinly veiled secret) were actually working, and quite efficiently to boot.
And ever since that outbreak the policy changed, and remote work is now a thing. Maybe not like big-R remote, but at least it went from an outright systemic impossibility to being possible.
The French administration at large was extremely reluctant to allow remote work, even very occasionally, if at all, purely by policy. Then the outbreak happened and people started calling in sick.
But when you're calling in sick, chances are you've already been contagious, and so the body count started to go way up, until people started asking to work remotely instead because it was obvious their work could be carried remotely and they just did not want to become sick, because it just made sense.
Which was denied. Because policy.
So people started calling in fake sick (sometimes with direct management being complicit) and worked from home anyway. And then upper management realised that... it worked! People that were marked as sick (but were not, this was a thinly veiled secret) were actually working, and quite efficiently to boot.
And ever since that outbreak the policy changed, and remote work is now a thing. Maybe not like big-R remote, but at least it went from an outright systemic impossibility to being possible.