China’s latest covid lockdowns are again affecting global supply chains

China’s aggressive pursuit of covid-zero has revved into high gear against omicron, locking down whole cities for weeks, closing factories, and throttling ports, raising concerns that China’s efforts to control omicron’s runaway transmissibility will prolong or worsen manufacturing and shipping delays for the battered global supply chain.

Already, companies are seeing production delays. This week, Toyota said that operations had come to a halt at its factory in Tianjin, the Wall Street Journal reported, after the city imposed mandatory testing after detecting two cases of the omicron variant. Volkswagen also closed a plant there as well as in the port city of Ningbo, where a small outbreak occurred, the Journal reported.