We are now firmly in the second phase of the pandemic, the one people are calling "It Didn’t Have To Be This Way."
We have more people getting sick in Rio Arriba County, and know less about them than we did in March. We passed a milestone today when more than 200 cases were diagnosed since the Coronavirus first appeared in the county on March 25. [1]
Our numbers of cases reported within 14 days had been creeping up from 45 on July 10 to 51 on July 16. Then, exactly two weeks after the Fourth of July, 37 new cases were reported on July 17, making the two-week total 87. Today, it was 99.
It’s easy to say "Aha, the Fourth" but, until recently, the two-week period was the extreme end of the period when people became sick. Symptom usually appear after about four days.
However, testing is no longer a useful measure. Numbers of cases have been increasing in so many states, including neighboring Texas and Arizona, that commercial laboratories that process the swabs can’t keep up, and results are taking a week to produce.
Colorado’s governor said Sunday that "every test we send out to private lab partners nationally, Quest, Labcorp, seven days, eight days, nine days — maybe six days if we're lucky. Almost useless from an epidemiological or even diagnostic perspective." [2]
The problem was the expectation this particular virus would disappear like the seasonal flu, so corporations didn’t invest in increasing their capacity. It made no sense to build new facilities and train new people on a tight schedule, when everything would be redundant in a few months. They only would have acted if they had had some government guarantees for financing, or if they believed their competitors would also act so no one would be at a competitive disadvantage for investing capital funds.
The same problem is happening in other areas of manufacturing. When I went to the grocery today, I noticed more empty shelves, especially in canned soup, canned tomato sauces and salsas, and canned entrees like ravioli.
I no longer can get the type of pizza I’ve been eating. It, and every other type from the one company, has been gone for more than two weeks. The company has exhausted its inventory. Some of the last ones I bought had ice crystals or odd packages that indicated they were the last items in storage.
Pizza, and many of the other foods I mentioned, contain tomatoes. They may not be able to be produced until tomatoes grown in this country are available. Shipments of produce from other countries probably have decreased with various types of international quarantines, and our domestic output may not be able to compensate in quantity within one growing season.
Tomato products may be another casualty of the agricultural cycles that made brown rice scarce this spring.
However, not every type of soup uses tomatoes. Chicken soups have been randomly available since spring: gone, then back, and now gone again.
We know the problem here: chicken producers have had the same problems as meat producers. They didn’t take the Coronavirus serious, and didn’t rethink their manufacturing processes. They had to close down to sanitize their sites. I’m not sure how many actually spent money on safety measures like installing plexiglass shields between work stations.
Not all companies have been passively waiting for things to get better. Amazon’s head, Jeff Bezos, responded to overwhelming demand in the spring by spending money to increase capacity. He saw possibilities in a permanent increase in business as people who wouldn’t buy things online had to change, and once over their qualms would become permanent customers.
In his case, it was a combination of entrepreneurial vision and cash resources. Unlike many companies that have come under the control of hedge funds, debt didn’t prevent him from acting.
Another industry that seems to have risen to the occasion is plexiglass. Natalia Broda said, that in Michigan, companies have been working full-time since March to meet demands. In one small company, the heads of Service Glass Company met two weeks after everything shut down, because they saw the possibility they would be inundated with orders.
Plaskolite, who makes the resin that is processed into sheets, has been running at near full capacity at ten plants seven days a week. This is the kind of operation that is so automated, few people are needed on the plant floor. It could increase production with fewer worries about contagion than a poultry plant. Its only worry is maintenance to keep machinery running.
Apart from wistful thinking, the biggest problem with economists in Washington is they only understand the stock market, which is driven by those hedge funds. I don’t know anyone in this, or previous administrations, who actually understands how an assembly line works. That expertise has been driven overseas by companies outsourcing their manufacturing operations. It’s a more serious loss than the resulting extended supply chains.
People in Detroit in the 1970s began warning these kinds of problems would occur sooner or later. The crises in the food supply did not have to be.
Fortunately, the knowledge and managerial skills survive in some places, like Detroit, and in some industries. The article I mentioned on plexiglass was written for a suburban newspaper outside Detroit by a female reporter who’d been around long enough to know the questions to ask for readers who still understood manufacturing from the plant floor up.
Sources:
1. Wikipedia. "2020 Coronavirus Pandemic in New Mexico." Updated daily.
2. Jared Polis. Meet the Press. 19 July 2020. Reported by David Cohen. "Colorado Governor: ‘National testing scene is a complete disgrace’." Politico website. 19 July 2020.
3. Natalie Broda. "Local Manufacturers Working 24/7 To Supply Plastic Protective Barriers." The Oakland [County, Michigan] Press website. 6 July 2020.
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