My father was a freight Sea Captain. We learned that lesson way back in the 70's when the Suez canal was closed and boats from east Africa to Europe had to take the long way round the southern cape. Everyone knows the canal is a potentially fragile bottleneck, but what can you do about it. It's not like there are many places where you can dig a sufficiently geographically distant backup option to cover most common threat scenarios.

Interconnected but not really fragile. One of the things about the pandemic that I was surprised by is how little effect it had. I kept buying food at the supermarket yet the naysayers were telling us we would be eating each other by now.

I think the chain was fragile, in that we immediately saw disruptions and shortages... but also adaptable, in that people responded and corrected them. Few problems can stand against a million competent businesses all working to fix things.

I want to see a detailed, process-oriented documentary about how the toilet paper manufacturers and distributors responded during the first few weeks of the pandemic. I bet there were damn near heroic efforts put out by some individuals, just to keep the supply flowing.

The biggest difference (in the U.K.) is that almost all offers, discounts, disappeared. Effectively a temporary price hike.

So I concluded that probably my mistake was to underestimate the power of the market to regulate demand through higher prices. I can imagine people who stockpiled initially wouldn’t have been so keen to fill the trolley once the prices of some products doubled.

There are many more examples all around the world like that. It's just that we don't apply the same rules in order to keep the supply chain going, which is needed to keep civilization going and not going into a SHTF scenario. At least here in Canada, meat processing plants is another one of those examples. They had a real issue with that in the beginning where too many plants were shut down due to infections. It's the same in Germany for example. It's low paid labour. Usually done by people from Eastern Europe and they live crammed together while in Germany and they have a steady flow of people coming and going to flout rules about paying for proper social insurance and such, so you have a steady exchange of potential Covid-19 carriers between countries that have lived and worked in ideal conditions for large outbreaks. But you know, people gotta eat and eat cheap!

We did briefly have that with the border between the UK and the EU. It soon got resolved.

It strikes me as cognitive dissonance and rigid thinking that capitalism equals always bad ior global connections equals always bad and spitefully trying to find something to justify their dogma.

I feel the 'toilet paper shortage'- period of the pandemic provided a much more visceral idea of how fragile it all is. This ship we won't feel in our daily lives anytime soon.

If a dog poops on the floor, we generally do not just wipe it a few times with a dry paper towel. It's intriguing we humans find that an acceptable solve when it comes to our own body.

I felt similarly about the pandemic exposing the fragility of our economy and the cracks in our political systems. Of course I would never say I'm glad that we had a pandemic considering the lives and livelihoods lost, including among my family.

I have to say I'm of the opposite view - all things considered systems and people have been pretty resilient and have coped quite well.

Of course for some it's been worse than for others, but on the whole the planet has coped not too badly. It has also flushed out at least one useless govt from power (US), is in the process of hopefully doing so with another (Brazil), and we can only hope that it will also hasten the departure of England's PM too.

We have however been very very lucky this time in that the virus is not that serious. A repeat e.g. of the 1918 influenza would have been much much worse.

I mean, it's all relative, right? From my US perspective, I guess prior to the pandemic, I thought the CDC was one of the few federal agencies with a high degree of competence, but they didn't even have meaningful reserves of ventilators, masks, or other PPE nor any plans to procure the same (even though we've had several major respiratory epidemics). Similarly, there were apparently no plans to scale up PCR testing capacity, and the CDC rejected the WHO test in favor of its own tests which were problematic at the start, especially in that they were difficult to scale. The testing turned out to be an even bigger debacle because it left decision makers completely in the dark.

Even if you lay the blame at the hands of Congress for defunding them, that still indicates a problem with our political health.

So yeah, we didn't enter a dark age or anything, but it was far worse than I would have guessed. The death toll is still quite high, but to your point, it could have been higher.

> We have however been very very lucky this time in that the virus is not that serious. A repeat e.g. of the 1918 influenza would have been much much worse.

I guess my point is that prior to the pandemic, I expected that our advancements in science and technology (if not politics) would have left us much more capable of dealing with a disease like the 1918 influenza than we apparently are.

If somebody bombed the canal or a ship sank at the entrance then it would be a similar situation. Sometimes it's just risk and crazy events, not some planned ineptitude.

The fact that the world continues just fine is actually evidence of how resilient everything is.

Probably. Impacts wont be apparently for a while I guess.

(true story, but to be taken in jest)

Nothing vital of course, still.