The Ripple Effect of COVID-19 on the 2021 Global Supply Chain.

Supply chains have a long history of resiliency, mostly with minor issues. The pandemic of 2020-21 and a series of other events during 2021 have opened the eyes of many supply chain managers, to the point where they are rethinking their supply chains. It started in early 2020 with COVID shutting down factories and shipping organizations worldwide. We saw, for example, issues with active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) used to make drugs in the United States, finding that over 80% come from China and India and 97 percent of all antibiotics in the United States come from China. With this shut down for a period of time in 2020, the US came close to disaster in the drug industry. But 2021 saw even more problems with the ship Even Given stuck in the Suez Canal for over a week, blocking all ship traffic and causing major supply chain disruptions around the world. And now, in late 2021 with the rise of the Delta variant, ports world-wide are having issues importing and exporting, mostly because they can’t get enough workers to handle the load. As of this writing, the southern ports of California, Los Angeles and Long Beach have 88 ships waiting offshore to unload. In contrast, prior to 2020 there would be one ship at most waiting offshore. And now, Costco and Home Depot have made dramatic changes in their supply chain, renting multiple cargo ships to have tighter control over the goods they import from China. With all of these issues and more, this paper provides and in-depth look at what is happening to world-wide shipping today