Absolutely agree with the comments re work and doing home working, and also about air quality.
Productivity and output does seem to go up with home working, though I think long term fatigue may set in. It makes sense for more firms to encourage home working, and even try to improve it. Many of us are communicating using laptops, desktops with cameras, but maybe if this is to become more mainstream, better audio and video systems should be used.
I suspect that some people are becoming too focused on work, and this is not really good for them in the long term. However, reducing commuting would be a very good thing in some parts of the UK. If one has to commute, it would be pleasanter if that at least meant getting a seat on a train - though maybe railway company profits would go down. I don't see that we have to act in ways simply in order to keep some company profits up - for example sandwich bars and railways, airlines, aircraft manufacturers and travel companies, though there are issues to address there.
Noise is also a factor - and I have noticed a very significant increase in noise due to the road outside and increased traffic in the last month. In terms of pollution, where we now live pollution is likely to be low, even with petrol cars, but I do wish the cars were a bit quieter. I need to do a test with our EVs now, to see how noisy they are when driven past our house. I suspect that from the roadside they are a lot quieter.
I found this article from the Atlantic - which presents a fairly comprehensive view of the USA's approach to Covid - The article attempts to analyse what the USA has done - or not done -
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/a...winter/616204/
I suspect that the article could also reflect what has been going on in the UK too. It's difficult to know what to do. Some of the "facts" in the video mentioned earlier seem to be correct - but it might still be too early to claim that various official interventions haven't worked. We do not have the luxury of multi-populations so that we can do controlled testing of different strategies, and although country comparisons may give some clues, for many reasons those are also imperfect.
There is much more known about Covid 19 now than there was at the beginning of the year, but we would probably be foolish to think we know it all, and it is now safe to crawl out of the woodwork.
These have been interesting times!