Yesterday, I got called in to work on my day off because someone was out with Coronavirus. This is not to unexpected but it did get me thinking, and it seems a lot of other people are thinking the same thing. Right now #bareshelvesBiden is trending and people are showing pictures of empty shelves across America.
We are on the verge of major supply chain issue. This has many causes. The first is that our supply chains never actually recovered from 2020. We have exhausted much of our backlog for food and other supplies in 2020 and we didn't actually ever resupply it. That means that when any shock to the system happens we end up with bare shelves.
Of course this is going to be complicated by the idiotic, unconstitutional and just plain evil vaccine mandate. These idiotic mandates are causing a lot of people to lose their jobs and many of these jobs are not being refilled. We were already in a major worker crisis in the first place but this is making everything worse. It's the worst thing we could be doing but so far the Supreme Court hasn't reigned in the Biden administration.
Omicron is the shock to the system that could really screw things up. There are a lot of people that are going to get sick with Omicron. Essentially everyone will get the virus at some point given how fast it is spreading and how little both natural immunity and vaccination seem to be doing against it.
The good news is that Omicron is very mild. Very few people are getting seriously ill with the virus, let alone dying or being hospitalized. Everything I have heard is that Omicron is somewhere between an easy cold or easy flu in terms of how sick you can get. And many, if not most, people will get the virus and never know that they had it.
The problem with that is that we are still treating the virus like it's the original Wuhan strain of the Coronavirus. Omicron isn't anything like the old virus in terms of risk but we are still treating it like it is a plague. People are being sent home for at least five days, perhaps more, and nobody is being allowed to work through the infection. And if you test positive and have no symptoms and your workplace finds out about it you are out of work too.
That means a whole lot of people are going to be out of work at once. It could be in the millions and that will make a huge amount of trouble for everyone. I work in the food industry and I can tell you we probably could have 10% of our workforce out without too many problems. But after that it gets a lot more difficult to the point where we could end up shutting down.
What is annoying is that this is all unnecessary. If it wasn't for the stupid vaccine mandate we would have some wiggle room but all these people are out of work now. Plus, if we were reacting to Omicron based on its actual threat instead of panicking about it for no reason, we wouldn't have to send all these people home.
Keep in mind that we are in the middle of winter and there is always a chance of severe weather making things even worse. What happens if there is a major blizzard that further disrupts transportation and production? We could be heading to a very dark place.
I also don't think that this is a short term problem as well. Even if the problems were solved today, it takes a long time to work through the supply chain. The system is already in trouble and adding this additional pressure will make things so much worse. Am I worried that the system will collapse? Not really, but I do think the next couple of months will be bad.
Most critically, this will likely lead to even more inflation. The demand for food will not go down but the supply absolutely will, which will lead to higher prices. And that's just for food, any product that has production in the United States will have increased prices. Plus transportation will be affected as well.
I think one man is responsible for this and that's Joe Biden. Omicron isn't his fault, not entirely, because it was always going to happen. The vaccine mandate though, that's 100% on him. It's an absolute disaster that could have been easily avoided. And it's also on him that he hasn't pulled back on Coronavirus restrictions. He's going to make this situation so much worse than it had to be.
If there is any good news it's this, Biden's going to be finished after the 2022 midterms. Even if the Coronavirus is nothing but a bad memory by this fall, and it seems like it will be, the problems caused by Biden's policy on the issue will be long term. The economy will suffer for this and the average person will have a lot less money to spend and nothing to spend it on in the first place...
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