Like Alice after her tumble down the rabbit hole, we find ourselves plunged into a strange new world that is both vaguely familiar and disarmingly alien. What was once recognisable isn’t what it appears to be. The old rules no longer apply.

The financial crash of 2008 was meant to rewrite the economic rulebook, and in some respects it did. Among other things, it undoubtedly fuelled the rise of social enterprise, as a generation of graduates emerged into a market where there were precious few jobs to be had. Looking around at the human destruction caused by the near collapse of the global banking system, many chose to strike out on a new way of doing business that more equally benefits owners, employees and the wider community.

But unprecedented intervention by governments and central banks – think of quantitative easing, and the effective nationalisation of major financial institutions – meant the reshaping of the global economy was ultimately less radical than it might have been. The Covid-19 crisis is different again, and will have far wider and deeper ramifications.

Conventional economic theory states that in leaner times it’s the “defensive” stocks – shares in companies making products that consumers can’t do without – that tend to outperform. A new car or a holiday abroad is likely out of the question, but household necessities and the occasional small treat remain within grasp.

Yet on Wednesday, consumer products behemoth Unilever reported flat sales growth for the first quarter of this year. The maker of omnipresent brands such as PG Tips, Domestos, Dove, Cornetto, Lynx and hundreds more said lockdowns are laying waste to personal grooming standards. The resulting decline in sales of shampoo, shaving cream and deodorant was not offset by a surge in cleaning products.

If conventional economic wisdom held true, then it would have been reasonable to expect growth in Unilever’s first quarter sales, rather than stagnation.

“But that’s just it,” as one analyst said. “This crisis is up-ending everything we once took as gospel. In fact, it has not just torn up the economic rulebook, but instead doused it in petrol, set it on fire and danced all over the pile of ashes that’s left.”

So this pandemic is clearly reshaping our world. Some of these shifts are already apparent, but many are evolving towards outcomes that we don’t yet realise and can’t begin to imagine.

One line of thinking speculates that this health crisis could lead to the creation of a generation of “supersavers” who, having woken up to the reality that the world is much more fragile than once thought, are wary of taking financial risks. Any such societal move towards cash hoarding would inevitably hamper economic recovery and growth, but there are potential upsides as well.

Our economy was simply not equipped to deal with the likes of coronavirus. But in a system where the default is equally set at protecting both personal and wider interests, there lies the possibility of a more financially robust society.

Despite his considerable gravitas, many raised an eyebrow when Bill Gates warned in 2015 that the world was not ready for the next epidemic.

Now irrefutably proven to have been correct, the philanthropic founder of Microsoft was writing last week in The Economist about how we might emerge from this mess.

He pointed out that when historians get around to writing the book on Covid-19, what we’ve lived through so far won’t be much more than the prologue. The bulk of the story is about what happens next.

Gates contemplates a world where national, regional and global organisations participate in regular “germ games” in the same way that armed forces take part in war games.

He then goes on to argue for a global push to build up the primary health care systems in the world’s poorest countries.

“If a novel virus appears in a poor country, we want its doctors to have the ability to spot it and contain it as soon as possible,” he concludes.

Wealthy isolationist governments may well prefer a system where critical supplies go to the highest bidder, but as Covid-19 has shown, that will not protect their self-interests. Such is the way of our interconnected global economy.

The 2008 financial crisis threatened the viability of the banking system, but novel coronavirus is jeopardising capitalism’s most fundamental institution: the labour market. What’s required is a system that puts this vital commodity at the centre of the model.

That includes mental as well as physical health. Many average citizens in the world’s developed economies have paid dearly for the lacklustre recovery from the banking collapse.

Austerity has ground down the people who were least able to foot the bill for economic reconstruction, while those in the squeezed middle were slowly sucked into the quagmire as real wages in the UK only just crept back to pre-recession levels at the end of last year.

Small wonder, then, that rates of anxiety and depression have been on the rise. Combating poor mental health has been a fashionable topic in corporate literature these last few years, but unfortunately much of this remains lip service. Ingraining these issues into the fabric of how we do business is the only way to significantly cut the massive cost of lost productivity.

A further crucial element in creating a more resilient economy is the need to protect our planet. The immediate emergency of Covid-19 has displaced climate change from the forefront of the agenda, but the threats remain on the near horizon. Corporations and industry must keep upping the sustainability of their operations if we are to avoid future worldwide economic shocks.

All of these things will come at a cost, but together will only amount to a fraction of the price of keeping society afloat through the current health crisis. It’s a mandatory investment to ensure our collective future.

The way we judge business success needs a near-complete overhaul. It’s going to require a new financial matrix, and a fresh economic lexicon.