JOEL KOTKIN: It’s Not Going To Be A Blue Future: Coronavirus and the future of living and working in America. “Ever since classical times, pandemics have tended to be especially tough on large, dense urban areas. A look at a map of COVID-19 infections, reveals that the vast majority of cases have occurred in dense cities, like Wuhan, and later on around Milan, and, to a lesser extent, Seattle, Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York and Boston. In contrast there has been very little incidence in vast middle of country and particularly more rural areas, which benefit from less crowding and unwanted human contact, which now may be even more attractive to urban workers.”

I’ve always thought that one driver for suburbanization after World War Two was the display of photos showing how much of various urban areas would be destroyed by an atomic bomb. Suddenly, it seemed safer to live a ways from town. This may have a similar effect.