The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed serious vulnerabilities in healthcare supply chains in many countries, including the UK. Shortages in protective equipment are leading to staffing problems in many hospitals. If these problems aren’t soon resolved they could jeopardise the operations of the entire health system. The same threat looms over the care sector. And even if the NHS remains well-enough staffed to sustain its operations, ventilator shortages may mean that critically ill patients don’t have access to essential life-saving treatments at the peak of the pandemic. And stocks of the chemical supplies needed in order to produce test kits, and vaccines – if and when one is viable – are running short as well.
Countries should try to take proactive measures to pre-emptively mitigate the harm done by future pandemics by disaster-proofing their healthcare supply chains. The probability of another pandemic in the foreseeable future that’s as bad as or worse than COVID-19 may be small. But the probability-weighted downsides of this possible outcome are great enough that they warrant action in strengthening supply chains. This is just one action that’s warranted among others. The question I want to home in on here is how we can disaster-proof supply chains without it being so expensive as to (a) carry prohibitive op-portunity costs, or (b) become politically untenable once the galvanised mood around COVID-19 subsides.
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