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Opinion
David Fickling and Anjani Trivedi

Supply Chain Snarls May Be Here to Stay, Too

So far, China has been able to keep up with consumer demand. That may be about to change as omicron moves across the country.

These localized outbreaks are tough to contain.

These localized outbreaks are tough to contain.

Photographer: Qilai Shen/Bloomberg

From the way people have worried about it, you might think that the world’s value chains have been in turmoil for much of the past two years.

Searches for the term “supply chain” on Google roughly doubled between June and October, when they briefly overtook “interest rates” as a topic of concern. That coincides with a period when the cost of shipping a container from China to the U.S. west coast nearly tripled, while the queue of vessels waiting to berth at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach grew to record levels.