Sir Mark Sykes, the British colonel and diplomat who co-engineered the partition of the Ottoman Empire, was in Paris to partake in the post-World War One peace negotiations when he fell ill with the Spanish flu in 1919. He died, one day short of his fortieth birthday.

US president Woodrow Wilson was also attending the talks in Paris, and also caught the Spanish flu. He survived; but some historians theorise that the illness might have left him with neurological problems that caused him to struggle to focus and made him paranoid. Perhaps for that reason, Wilson’s fine-tuned peace plan was outflanked by the hawkish French, who pushed for a punitive peace against Germany, planting the seeds of German revanchism. It didn’t end well.

Diplomacy is a delicate job. It is also a job that involves a lot of handshaking, back-slapping, group dining, close-quarters discussing, and occasional shouting at each other. Diplomacy is not conducive to not catching the Spanish flu – or, more to the point, coronavirus.

There was no handshake in Brussels on March 2 as the UK and the EU kick-started the negotiations on their post-Brexit trade relationship. The EU’s chief negotiator Michel Barnier, and his UK counterpart David Frost stood awkwardly side by side, much closer to each other than the one-metre “social distancing” the WHO recommends in order to avoid contracting Covid-19. Hopefully nobody sneezed or coughed, unleashing pernicious droplets.

In a presser on March 5, Barnier said he would be taking a “pragmatic” approach, abiding by the health recommendations of both the EU and the UK. “I don’t want to commit to anything,” he said. “We have a timetable.” Following that timetable would be his and Britain’s negotiating teams. Negotiation rounds, Barnier said, usually involve up to 200 people in the same room, or in two adjacent rooms. The next, increasingly unlikely, round is scheduled for March 18 in London. After the precipitation of events in Italy and elsewhere, it is worth wondering whether the Brexit negotiations – even in their handshakeless version – can go on in their current form.

Elsewhere, the coronavirus pandemics is already taking its toll on diplomacy. US president Donald Trump cancelled a meeting with the leaders of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations out of coronavirus concerns. The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund are reportedly considering holding an important meeting in April via teleconference.

In a way, the tools to save middle-aged diplomats and elderly heads of state from contagion are all there. While we have been conducting diplomacy through face-to-face meetings for millennia, over the past few decades digital technology has ushered in more remote discussions. When they are not sitting in the same wood-panelled rooms, diplomats and negotiators would continue their discussions via WhatsApp, email, or on the phones.

“In between formal rounds there's lots of continued contacts at every level: most of these people calling each other, others are emailing and so on,” says Philip Rycroft, the former permanent secretary at the Department for Exiting the European Union, and currently a specialist partner at consulting firm Flint Global.

Read more: Does alcohol kill coronavirus? The biggest myths, busted

Diplomats, including Barnier and Frost, could theoretically just switch to videoconferencing – from the humble Zoom call, to more pricey bespoke technologies. Still, technical feasibility is not everything. “Face to face is important in order to build trust, and that's what will be a lot more difficult if the interactions are just over the phones or over video conference,” Rycroft says. “The body language, the ability to have informal conversations in an informal setting, as in so many other transactions, are important.” He underlines that trust is especially important when it comes to the EU-UK negotiations which, unlike most trade talks, are about mitigating Brexit’s fallout rather than improving on existing commercial links.

A general shift from in-person diplomacy to digital negotiation will present three major challenges, says Jovan Kurbalija, founding director of DiploFoundation, a nonprofit promoting the adoption of digital technology in diplomacy. One is, simply, that some high-stake negotiations require physically locking a bunch of sweaty diplomats in a room until they agree. The 1995 Dayton Agreement, in which the warring parties in the Bosnia and Herzegovina conflict convened for twenty days in an Ohio airforce base, is a textbook case. “Where you have a lot at stake, when you have a lot of emotions, and political engagement –like in peace treaties – I would say that you need physical presence,” Kurbalija says. The risk of a Skype call being cut short by a defiant diplomat, or of a head of state grandstanding on Twitter before the agreement is signed is just too high.

Second: diplomacy is about formality and pageantry. It is as much about fine-tuning phytosanitary standard as it is about powerful individuals swaggering on maroon carpets before a row of waving flags. It is about photo ops, and – yes – about shaking hands.

“There is a ritual aspect of diplomacy when high profile people send the message basically: 'we are in charge. Don't worry. We are negotiating. We shouldn't be underestimated',” Kurbalija says.

Rycroft agrees. “There is something of the drama of the negotiations,” Rycroft says. “That is an important part of [diplomacy], because it makes the wider public aware that the negotiations are happening. And people need to understand these things are going on, because they’ll ultimately impact their lives.”

That sense of urgency might be hard to replicate when negotiators set about starting a massive Skype call. If anything, post-Covid-19 diplomacy will need a new grammar of solemnity.

But maybe the most important hurdle to conducting diplomacy without flesh-and-blood meetings is what happens behind the scenes. Formal negotiation rounds are not simply about principal-to-principal confabs taking place in a room, or – to put it another way – Brexit negotiations will not only be about Frost and Barnier duking it out while other 198 people watch in awe. Negotiators on both sides will also engage in what cookie-pushers call “corridor diplomacy”: diplomats of various ranks building rapport over coffee, at lunch, or in the friteries of Brussels.

“You have relationships being built up between dozens of different people and all of those are ultimately important for effective behavioural negotiations,” Rycroft explains.

“Those individual relationships are what will help people to find the keys to unlock the door when solutions are behind that door.”

In a way, corridor diplomacy has already moved partly online. Kurbalija says that ambassadors would chat in WhatsApp groups, and joke on social media in the same way they would do after the third pint in a pub. But a total shift from the corridor to the app might be hazardous. Written messages lends themselves to more misunderstandings than a verbal remark, and can be screenshot, circulated and misinterpreted for lack of context. Social media joshing is a powder keg of diplomatic crisis.

“On social media, things can escalate: social media is basically an amplifier,” Kurbalija says. “Some trivial message could be a major problem.”

That was on full display in 2018, when a bit of Instagram persiflage by European Council president Donald Tusk at the expenses of then-prime minister Theresa May elicited outrage in the UK. What would have been a dad joke if uttered in person became a social media scandal. (Of course, we don’t need to mention the poster boy of impromptu Twitter diplomacy.)

For all these reasons, Kurbalija thinks that, while Covid-19 might cause an increasing share of technical, fine-print discussions to move online, key meetings will still need to take place in person.

“It is hybrid diplomacy: some traditional tools, some new tools,” he says. “You will have a stronger push towards online negotiation, but ultimately, you will have some sort of blended diplomacy with the occasional physical meetings and, and more than now, online meetings.” He says that over the past few days international organisations have been calling him to ask for advice on how to reinvent their way of holding meetings.

Over time, more immersive video conferencing tools might emerge, alleviating some of the shortcomings of remote negotiations. But that would present another kind of challenge. For instance, not all countries will necessarily be able to afford the cutting-edge technologies required for digital diplomacy. More crucially, the whole culture of diplomacy will have to be rethought.

“It's not only about what technology we buy, it's also about how we agree to use this technology in order to interact around diplomatic issues,” says Noam Ebner, a professor of negotiation and conflict resolution at Creighton University. “The other thing that needs to be redefined is the norms of the playing out of diplomacy through this technology.”

When it comes to Brexit negotiation, though, there is really no time for all that. Frost and Barnier will have to make-do with what is already available. A diplomatic source from a European country says that where there’s a will, there’s a way. Skype conversations and encrypted texting might well be used, given that “the need to progress is paramount,” they say. But both Number 10 and a EU spokesperson say that there are currently no defined plans for conducting negotiations remotely.

That will have to need to change soon. The clock to December 31 is ticking, and the UK might well find itself without a new deal with its biggest trading partner. (Barring an extension to the transition period, which prime minister Johnson has so far ruled out.)

“There are not many negotiation days left, and this all has to be wrapped up really before the end of October,” Rycroft says. “We risk losing two or three months because of Coronavirus, and that would take out over a third of effective remaining time which is already very precious.”

Gian Volpicelli is WIRED's politics editor. He tweets from @Gmvolpi

This article was originally published by WIRED UK