It’s a commonplace that emergencies can bring people together. But the imperative issued right now by experts, governments and businesses seems to suggest the very opposite: The sign that you care is that you engage in “social distancing.”

Rather than looking after others — and possibly infecting them — the best you can do for society is to look after yourself in digitally connected isolation. And yet it would be wrong to think that the coronavirus outbreak will only reinforce the selfishness from which Western societies already suffer. Like the Spanish flu of 1918 and other previous shared experiences of vulnerability, this pandemic can pave the way for the collective insight that we absolutely need a public infrastructure — and not just in health care.

The feeling that there is less and less social cohesion in today’s democracies is justified. A recent survey in France showed that 35 percent of people think they have absolutely nothing in common with their fellow citizens. Today, the wealthiest are seceding into gated communities; some are even contemplating escapes into outer space or to remote locations (think about the fantasies spun out by Silicon Valley billionaires like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk). Meanwhile, the poorest hardly participate in society at large — and certainly not in elections, a trend that has long been clear in the United States, but is now affecting other democracies, too.

There are larger reasons behind such trends. After the end of the Cold War, it became ever less obvious for what exactly we need our fellow citizens: with the globalization of supply chains, it seemed that we could do without them as workers; with free trade, we have no need of them as consumers; and, with the shift away from mass conscript armies, we also don’t really need them as soldiers.