In the first week of March, the FT person who assesses the safety of our travel told me my planned trip to Abidjan was “low risk”. At that stage, Côte d’Ivoire had no confirmed coronavirus cases. There were no more than a handful in West Africa.
That evening, the Africa CEO Forum, where I was to be a moderator, called the event off. And here we are, at the end of March, with gatherings cancelled, cities in lockdown, aircraft parked and the biggest closure of national borders since the second world war.
A couple of people have told me, with grim satisfaction, that the grounding of business travellers is an overdue reckoning and that when this is over, we can run our economies locally and end the climate-destroying flights that accompanied globalisation.