If Covid-19 spreads in the same way in the West, we are probably about to embark on an unprecedented experiment in remote working

Considering they are dedicated to making almost everything instantly available at the touch of a button, the giants of Silicon Valley devote a disproportionate sum of attention to the places where they work.

Tech offices are famous for their perks and architectural flourishes. Apple’s spaceship-esque headquarters, which reportedly cost $5bn (£3.9bn), boasts miles of walkways designed to foster eureka moments.

Facebook’s California campus, designed by the architect Frank Gehry, is full of unfinished wooden surfaces – an effort to instil in its employees the scrappy DIY attitude to which Mark Zuckerberg attributes its success.

But over the past few days, these shrines to company culture were far more sparsely populated than usual. Last week, Twitter, Facebook, Apple and Google encouraged employees at their headquarters to start working from home, as dozens of cases of coronavirus were reported close to their headquarters.

This exodus was not confined to Silicon Valley. Tech offices in Seattle, America’s coronavirus hotspot, were practically bare. Facebook closed its London outpost and more than a thousand workers in Canary Wharf were sent home after employees contracted the virus. In China, many employees have been barred from their desks for several weeks.