Comment: how banks, builders, Pearson, GSK and AstraZeneca have innovated to survive the covid crisis

It’s easy amid the economic doom and gloom to lose sight of the innovative ways businesses have found to cope with the lockdown and all its difficulties.

Banks, law firms and accountants have decamped to home working in ways nobody would have thought possible eight weeks ago. From spare rooms and attic offices, armies of skilled advisers have raised billions of pounds of rescue funds for clients, saving a generation of jobs.

Pearson’s digital learning team has helped the world’s schools and universities switch relatively painlessly to home learning.

Construction firms unable to open show homes have kept sales going by using virtual showrooms online. Not to mention totally changing building sites to maintain social distancing.

The crisis has forced businesses, through trial and error, to innovate, change and probably improve the way they operate forever.

For drug companies, experimentation has always been bread and butter. It has stood us all in good stead for the current emergency.

AstraZeneca today pledged to have 30 million coronavirus vaccines available by September in the UK if late stage trials succeed in the coming months.

And GSK announced a stunning HIV breakthrough that could save millions of men’s lives around the world.

Not only have trials found its HIV prevention drug significantly more effective than Gilead’s rival medicine, but men only need to have an injection once every two months rather than take a daily pill.

GSK led the way against HIV/Aids with the first anti-retroviral AZT in 1987. At that stage the world was hunting for a cure. Now, it is close to stopping people getting the virus in the first place.

Reasons to be cheerful as a sunny week gets underway.