Shortages related to the COVID-19 pandemic

Shortages related to the COVID-19 pandemic are pandemic-related disruptions to goods production and distribution, insufficient inventories, and disruptions to workplaces caused by infections and public policy.

The landscape of shortages changed dramatically over the course of the pandemic. Initially, extreme shortages emerged in the equipment needed to protect healthcare workers, diagnostic testing, equipment and staffing to provide care to seriously ill patients, and basic consumer goods disrupted by panic buying. Many commercial and governmental operations curtailed or suspended operations, leading to shortages across "non-essential" services. For example, many health care providers stopped providing some surgeries, screenings, and oncology treatments.^[1] In some cases, governmental decision making created shortages, such as when the CDC prohibited the use of any diagnostic test other than the one it created. One response was to improvise around shortages, producing supplies ranging from cloth masks to diagnostic tests to ventilators in home workshops, university laboratories, and rapidly repurposed factories.^[2]

As these initial shortages were gradually remedied throughout 2020/2021, a second group of shortages emerged, afflicting industries dependent on global supply chains, affecting everything from automobiles to semiconductors to home appliances, in part due to China's determination to eliminate COVID-19 from its population by enforcing stringent quarantines and shutdowns, in part by disruptions to goods distribution, and in part by forecasting errors.^[3]

Shortages were concentrated in America, Europe, Latin America, and China, while other jurisdictions were much less affected, for a variety of reasons.