Culling the herd
In nature, predators will cull prey animals and limit population growth. When those predators are removed, prey populations will boom and bust through resource limitations and/or disease. Viruses are what Mother Nature uses when a population becomes too dense in order to push the numbers back down. Through better sanitation, healthcare and keeping fit, humans have been able to pack themselves in to denser and denser clumps. Many researchers have questioned why it's take this long to see another pandemic. It may be that it just took time for nature to brew one up with an incubation period long enough so it could travel efficiently by aircraft before it was spotted. So far, the morbidity/mortality rate hasn't been as bad as it could be. Ebola Zaire knocked people down in days with over 95% fatality and shows what a really hot virus can do.
A CEO that's had a more rounded education may see that putting their whole company or at least the core in one building packed as densely as possible to save money on rents might be taking on more risk than they had previously thought. Sometimes the flu would be bad enough to make a big difference to the bottom line, but what we have currently is a couple of orders of magnitude worse. Do countries have their entire military on one base? Heck no. Companies such as Boeing are spread all over the place as a result of war time planning. Missile silos are in widely separated installations so one attack doesn't take them all out. Government types had to be taken aside and given a talking to in California when they proposed consolidating emergency supply warehouses to save money. The whole point in having them in multiple locations was so in case of a big earthquake that damaged roads and rail, it might still be possible to distribute those supplies to all areas. In addition to saving money on rents, toilet paper and office furniture, a flu that ravages the art department isn't going to take out the accounting department as well. If the power goes out for some people working at home, it's not like the power going out in a whole building. The same goes for fire or police activities. If trains are late due to a signal failure, a company won't see a large numbers of people not being able to make it in on time. That can be a real possibility for a downtown high rise where public transportation is the only way for employees to get to work. The company is relying on the public infrastructure to be able to function. Given the state of bridges, one going out or having to be shut down due to deficiencies might take considerable time to put in order again. In the mean time, people have to leave even earlier to get a bus around the closure.
While WFH may be reduced, we may be seeing the beginning of the end of large downtown skyscrapers. Workers don't like them and companies seem to be finding out that they are too expensive to be going on with.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
