[antiSingularity]

You've got that mixed up. The reason that supply chains are in disarray are because of the enormous disruption caused by Covid restrictions and lockdowns, not because people were literally dying of Covid on the job.

You could infer that if we hadn't acted the way we did, then what I described would have actually happened and things would be a lot worse. You could also infer that long-term and large-scale control of an airbourne respiratory virus through social means is ineffectual, and things would have been about the same anyway (from a death and disease standpoint).

[tailspin2019]

I think the parent was more making the point that however we chose to deal with the pandemic, it was difficult to avoid disruption to the supply chain.

I guess the potential nuance is, blaming it on "lock downs" gets vaguely political whereas blaming it on the root cause, the pandemic, puts emphasis on the wider point that any actual pandemic of this magnitude is of course going to disrupt the worlds supply chain one way or another.

[CydeWeys]

> I guess the potential nuance is, blaming it on "lock downs" gets vaguely political whereas blaming it on the root cause, the pandemic, puts emphasis on the wider point that any actual pandemic of this magnitude is of course going to disrupt the worlds supply chain one way or another.

Thank you for phrasing so perfectly the exact point I was making. It feels disingenuous when people solely blame the reactions to a worldwide pandemic while ignoring that the worldwide pandemic was still gonna be happening regardless.

[antiSingularity]

Does blaming the declining mental and physical state of previously healthy people on "lockdowns" also get vaguely political? My wife and I did not come near to breakdowns as we tried to care for our young family through the lockdowns and restrictions because of Covid itself, I can tell you that much.

[antiSingularity]

In my opinion, blaming it on the pandemic is misleading, and hides the true cause of our problems. As I said, supply chains are disrupted because everyone was confined to their houses and completely changed their consumer and business spending habits. Referring to the title of this article, Intel NIC orders are not disrupted because all of the factory workers are dead of Covid. They are disrupted because supply and demand of all goods has radically changed, and our modern way of life depends on a very fragile balance of the flow of goods being maintained.

As I also pointed out, we will also never know how much good we actually did. You can tell me it's "obvious" that it did, but there's no evidence to back that up.

[nicoburns]

Even if the factory workers didn't die (some would, but most of them wouldn't have) there would still have been significant disruption if large parts of the workforce were off sick for several weeks.

[dboreham]

Periods of excess supply, and periods of shortage have characterized the semiconductor industry since the 1970s.