[antiSingularity]

In my opinion, blaming it on the pandemic is misleading, and hides the true cause of our problems. As I said, supply chains are disrupted because everyone was confined to their houses and completely changed their consumer and business spending habits. Referring to the title of this article, Intel NIC orders are not disrupted because all of the factory workers are dead of Covid. They are disrupted because supply and demand of all goods has radically changed, and our modern way of life depends on a very fragile balance of the flow of goods being maintained.

As I also pointed out, we will also never know how much good we actually did. You can tell me it's "obvious" that it did, but there's no evidence to back that up.

[nicoburns]

Even if the factory workers didn't die (some would, but most of them wouldn't have) there would still have been significant disruption if large parts of the workforce were off sick for several weeks.

[dboreham]

Periods of excess supply, and periods of shortage have characterized the semiconductor industry since the 1970s.