The Coronavirus Comes to a ‘Handshake Town’

D.C. has now reported one coronavirus death, adding to the more than 200 across the country so far and nearly 12,000 worldwide. One particular conference illustrated the dangers of the kinds of networking gatherings D.C. is accustomed to, when a single infected person at the Conservative Political Action Conference met with numerous lawmakers, sending some into self-quarantine. The president himself, who had brief contact with at least one member of a Brazilian delegation who tested positive for the coronavirus, later tested negative.

Read: Democracies must learn to work from home

The business of Washington, including the federal government, which shapes lives around the entire country, depends to a unique degree on human interaction. It’s not just that Congress currently has no way to pass laws, including coronavirus relief, without physically meeting and casting votes, social distancing be damned. The people working in and around politics—the lobbyists, PR folks, journalists, think tankers, lawyers, and nonprofit employees whose work depends on proximity to government—also find that it’s very hard to do their jobs without meeting people.

DC is a “handshake-and-a-lunch town,” according to CR Wooters, a former Hill staffer and lobbyist who co-founded the public-affairs firm Fio360.

Just a week ago, work-related socializing was still in full swing, even as Capitol Hill, executive-branch offices, and companies around the city were sending staffers home. The coronavirus was already starting to rip through states across the U.S. by last Friday, but in Washington, the power diners were still power dining at Cafe Milano; the lawmakers, many of them over 65, were still hobnobbing at the Capitol. Philippe Reines, a former Hillary Clinton adviser and now consultant, was invited to a private dinner discussion about the virus—that would feature a bunch of people ringing a dining table with place settings presumably fewer than six feet apart—and he was even tempted to go, he told me.

But now the crisis is forcing a change in behavior that just a few weeks ago would have looked impossible in D.C. The government is allowing mass teleworking for federal agencies; the White House and Pentagon are enforcing social distancing at press briefings. Think-tank events and book readings are moving online. Even the leaders of some of the richest countries on Earth are meeting via teleconference in June now that the Camp David G7 summit has been scrapped. It turns out, to the extent that it requires people moving information around, politics is indeed a function many internet applications can handle—you just need to see the pixels, not necessarily the people.

Still, actual face time is surviving in the city. It’s evident, for instance, on Capitol Hill—the engine of D.C.’s in-person culture to begin with—and at the White House, where senior administration officials and health experts are holding emergency meetings and delivering urgent information to the nation via daily briefings.

Ordinarily, Congress and its accompanying office buildings are teeming with politicians, staffers, journalists, and lobbyists. Aides gather behind members in hearings, passing notes; lobbyists and journalists plant themselves in the corridor off the Senate floor to snag impromptu meetings they’d never otherwise get. Members who might rarely interact otherwise size colleagues up during votes or scurry over to their desk to trade criticisms or ideas. In other words, Capitol Hill is a “petri dish” for the spread of the virus.