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I don't understand this comment, the purpose of emergency savings is for an unknown emergency. I think a pandemic would meet that criteria.

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Economic collapse, not pandemic. The idea behind typical emergency savings is for personal emergencies where stores/etc would still be business as usual, which isn't the case now.

How does that make any difference? In both cases, you loose your job, you live of your emergency savings for 6-12 month (hoping things are resolved in 6-12 months, but I do not think things will be back to normal in 6-12 months in this specific case). Isn't this what the emergency fund is for?

It holds if, as I said, the rest of the world was business-as-usual. It's not.

One example off the top of my head, groceries are becoming more costly due to supply chain issues from the economic collapse. Savings aren't going to go as far as planned.

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