Your company's supplies aren't arriving when they should. The item you bought online takes weeks to arrive. The furniture store tells you that the delivery time for your sofa will be fifteen days. These are just some of the inconveniences that businesses and consumers have been experiencing since the Covid took hold in our lives and caused the global supply chain to collapse. In late 2021, images of hundreds of ships waiting to unload at ports along the of the U.S.. Now it’s the ports of Shanghai, China’s largest city, which faced drastic lockdowns between March and April due to a COVID-19 outbreak. The result is hundreds of ships waiting to unload (as of April 19, there were more than 470 ships).

This image from VisualCapitalist, captured by the Sentinel-1 satellite on April 14, looks like a photo from space. But it isn't: each white dot, rather than being a star, is a ship. 

The biggest bottleneck is on land. In April, it was estimated that about 90% of the trucks transporting imports and exports were out of servicedue to lockdowns and mobility restrictions in the Chinese city.

Activity at ports in the Shanghai area rebounded in April, but it remains well below early March levels. About 20% of China’s containerized exports. It is still unclear when the situation will return to normal; it could become the worst crisis in the global supply chain since the start of the pandemic.