Five years is not realistic. More likely is one to two years of lockdowns broken up with periods of 'relief' to allow a degree of economic recovery.
The supply chain will just disintegrate otherwise.
The supply chain will just disintegrate otherwise.
I tried to buy a part for my dryer two weeks ago and it was going to take >2 months. I ended up then trying to buy a dryer and the only one I could purchase was already in store. If I tried to order one again it was >2 months (on an unknown timeline).
China is having massive production issues, there are import fees/inspections and now a 2 week quarantine on incoming goods.
It’s all kinds of messed up and now there’s a good reason to change production location.
I expect, though, that these sorts of things will get sorted out. For one, no government is going to be keen on letting people who are confined to home and dependent on computers and the Internet to keep their little corner of the economy going go without power for long just because it's suddenly next-to-impossible to get some special precision bracket from the overseas factory that got the contract to make it back in 2005, while at the same time the domestic economy has hordes of ex-machinists who aren't quite ready to retire yet yet, and would be more than happy to quit their jobs as greeters at the local big box store in order to return to a job that pays more and reduces their risk of exposure to SARS-CoV-2.
Worst case scenario, perhaps we won't return to the "easily availability of basically everything so everything's basically disposable because the global supply chain is so fluid that it's easier to buy new broken crap than replace old broken crap" that we enjoyed so far this millennium. But I doubt it'll get much worse than the level of availability that developed economies enjoyed when I was a kid. Which is still pretty good. It would take a bit longer to rejigger the design of consumer products so that they return to using more standardized parts that can easily be stocked locally instead of all this fragile, disposable, special snowflake industrial design. But I could see that shifting fairly quickly, too, if things are still looking bad in 5 years.
Huh, this is the first I hear of such a thing. Is this in the US? I thought the scientific consensus was that even under the most favorable circumstances the virus isn't viable on any surface after two or three days. And typically much shorter and very unlikely to be sufficiently concentrated in the first place, e.g., the person manufacturing your dryer in China won't be sneezing into it constantly. So locking things up for two weeks seems surprising.
Personally I'd much rather a slightly longer lockdown now than a long painful cycle of repeated lockdowns.