“I think a lot of it will remain this way after this crisis,” said Beccy Baird, a senior fellow at the King’s Fund, a health care research charity. “What’s really key is that we don’t lose patients’ ongoing relationships with a group of professionals at their home practice.”

Desperate as health systems are to keep coronavirus patients out of general practitioners’ offices, British doctors say the dams have broken. The telephone system for triaging virus patients is overwhelmed, leaving people pleading with their family doctors for help. Doctors are reluctant to treat infants with serious coughs over the phone. And some patients have other complaints on top of symptoms of the virus.

In some large primary care practices in London, doctors are setting up so-called dirty zones where they examine patients with respiratory symptoms and clean zones for everything else. Other primary care networks have set up entire clinics, known as “hot hubs,” devoted to possible coronavirus patients who have other pressing health problems.

Even so, general practitioners have been making do with almost no protective gear. Doctors have recently peeled back the labels on some shipments of surgical masks only to find years-old expiration dates.

With fears running high that some general practitioners could already be infected, they are all the more eager to treat anyone who can afford to stay home with a video session or a phone call.

And as lockdowns in Britain and across the rest of Europe continue and older people are advised to stay home, doctors see virtual visits as the only way of caring for people who can ill afford to lose track of everyday ailments.