Official Washington has it better than most. Many of us are still gainfully employed, riding out the coronavirus in our well-appointed urban townhomes and suburban McMansions as we hop from one Zoom videoconference meeting to the next in service of politicians, lobbying clients, and news editors. But for a town built on eye contact and a firm handshake, the pandemic-induced shutdown of America’s $20 trillion economy has been a real culture shock.

“What the fuck am I supposed to do now? I’m wearing out my phone checking in with people. I miss my casual friends I see after lunch at Joe’s,” a government relations executive told me recently, referring to Joe’s Seafood, Prime Steak & Stone Crab, situated in an old bank building just a stone’s throw from the White House, his favorite downtown D.C. watering hole for engaging in the kind of high-powered socializing that is the lifeblood of his business.

In the District, Maryland, and Virginia combined, the number of COVID-19 cases stands at more than 21,500. D.C. schools will remain closed for the rest of the school year, and lessons will end three weeks early, Mayor Muriel Bowser announced on Friday. Considering the fraught situation close to home, plus the more than 22 million Americans filing for unemployment aid since mid-March, and a death toll that’s still steadily climbing, the lamentations of the Washington elite may seem trite. But in D.C. perhaps more than anywhere else, derailing social interaction means a fundamental reworking of politics as usual. Right now, millions of Americans are looking to Washington for answers—answers for a public health crisis that has afflicted more than 700,000 and killed more than 40,000, answers for picking up the pieces of a fractured economy once it’s all over. And so much of what the federal government comes up with in the way of solutions depends on the business of politics.

That is fueled by whether the players at every level, from K Street, to Congress, to the White House, trust each other. As George P. Shultz, one of only two people to hold four different cabinet positions under multiple presidents, told me a few years back in an interview for the Washington Examiner when I asked what he viewed as central to effective, results-oriented governing: “Trust is the coin of the realm.” The existence of that trust, in a town that many Americans dismiss as a superficial swamp, is based largely on interpersonal relationships that take years to cultivate.

In an industry where practically everyone has a competing objective, even people who work together, even some who are married to one another, those relationships are best nurtured in person, with eye contact and a handshake, while throwing back overpriced liquor, in the shadow of ridiculously priced seafood towers and under the weight of bank-breaking bone-in ribeye steaks, at (name your favorite power spot; I have mine).

“Washington is a very small town, with people who have known each other for years, if not decades,” said a veteran Republican lobbyist, explaining that the worst time to make a friend in D.C. is “when you need something.” This operative emphasized that “it is always a good idea to develop relationships long before you’ll need to utilize them.”

It’s hard to describe to the casual observer how elemental personal connections are to the people who work here—so much so that on a recent Thursday evening a couple of weeks into sheltering at home, I found myself succumbing to what might previously have seemed like the act of a desperate agoraphobic: the Zoom happy hour. Sidling up to my usual spot at the dining room table of my Capitol Hill row home, Jefferson’s Reserve at hand, I joined a video call organized by the government relations executive who, as previously discussed, would much rather have been at his usual perch at Joe’s. About a dozen or so political professionals—lobbyists, congressional aides, campaign strategists—came and went over the next hour.