Off the coast of Los Angeles, more than 20 container ships filled with sports bikes, electronics and other much-coveted imports have been idle for up to two weeks.
And in Kansas City, farmers struggle to ship soybeans to buyers in Asia.
And in China, furniture destined for North America is piled high on factory floors.
And all over the planet, the epidemic has disrupted trade to an extraordinary degree, which led to an increase in the cost of shipping goods, and added a new challenge to the recovery of the global economy, as the virus has confused the system of transporting cargo from one continent to another.
At the center of this storm lie the shipping containers, which are the backbone of globalization.
Americans stranded in their homes unleashed a wave of increasing orders from factories in China, many of which were transported across the Pacific in containers, the metal crates that move goods in towering piles on top of huge ships.
As families in the United States filled bedrooms with office furniture and basements with treadmills, demand has outpaced the availability of containers in Asia, leading to a shortage of containers there while those boxes are piling up in American ports.
The containers that carried millions of masks to countries in Africa and South America early in the epidemic still remain there, empty and unconsolidated, because shipping companies have focused their ships on their most popular routes, those connecting North America and Europe to Asia.
In the ports where ships stop and carry cargo to unload, they are often stuck for days in water jams.
The epidemic and the restrictions have limited the availability of dock workers and truck drivers, causing delays in the flow of goods from Southern California to Singapore.
Every container that cannot be emptied in one place is the same as that which cannot be loaded elsewhere.
"I've never seen anything like this before," said Lars Michael Jensen, president of the Global Ocean Network at AB Muller-Maersk, the world's largest shipping company.
"All links in the supply chain tightened to the last, ships, trucks and warehouses," he added.
Economies around the world are absorbing the knock-on effects of disruption at sea.
The high costs of transporting US grains and soybeans across the Pacific Ocean threaten to increase food prices in Asia.
Empty containers are piling up in the ports of Australia and New Zealand, while containers are becoming scarce in the Indian port of Calcutta, forcing electronics makers to ship their wares more than 1,000 miles west to Mumbai port, where the container supply is better.
Rice exporters in Thailand, Vietnam and Cambodia are abandoning some shipments to North America due to the impossibility of securing containers.
The chaos on the seas proved to be a fortune for shipping companies like Maersk, which in February indicated high record freight rates when it reported that the pre-tax toll was more than $ 2.7 billion in the last three months of 2020.
No one knows how long this confusion will last, although some experts assume that containers will remain scarce until the end of the year, as the factories that make them - and nearly all of them in China - scramble to keep up.
Since it was first deployed in 1956, containers have revolutionized trade by allowing goods to be packed into standard size containers and lifted by gigantic cranes on railroad cars and trucks, effectively reducing distances on the globe.
Containers are the way flat displays made in South Korea are transported to factories in China that assemble smartphones and laptops, and it is the way these finished devices are shipped across the Pacific Ocean to the United States.
Any obstacle means a delay and an additional cost to someone.
The pandemic has disrupted every part of this journey.
"Everyone wants it all," said Achilles Nair, vice president of global shipping at SICO Logistics in Hong Kong.
"But the infrastructure cannot keep up," he added.
The traffic jam in front of the Port of Los Angeles is becoming so claustrophobic that ships have exhausted all docking areas (New York Times)
The mess starts like this
More than a decade ago, during the global financial crisis, shipping companies watched their business be ravaged.
With the emergence of a mysterious virus in China early last year - which prompted the government to close factories to contain its spread - the shipping industry prepared itself to repeat this, so transport companies reduced their services and suspended many of their ships.
However, even in the midst of this economic downturn, demands have soared for the protective supplies such as the masks and surgical gowns used by front-end medical personnel, most of which are made in China.
Chinese factories sped up and container ships carried their products to destinations around the world.
And unlike the financial crisis, when the economic recovery took years to recover, Chinese factories made a comeback in the second half of 2020, resulting in strong demand for shipping.
While shipping companies deployed every vessel that could float, they focused on the routes of greatest demand, especially the China Line to North America.
The pressure escalated when Americans reformulated their spending methods. After being deprived of vacations and restaurant meals, they bought video game consoles and pastry mixers, and retrofitted their homes to suit remote work and distance learning.
Exercise equipment shipped by containers from Asia to North America more than doubled during the period from September to November, compared to the same period a year earlier, according to an analysis by C-Intelligence, a corporation. Copenhagen based research.
Shipments of stoves, ovens and cooking equipment nearly doubled in that period, and disinfectants increased by more than 6,800%.
"All the things that have grown up were basically like that with the stimulus of the pandemic," said Alan Murphy, founder of the research group.
Overall, global trade volume decreased by only 1% in 2020 compared to the previous year.
But this does not reflect how the year has evolved, with a drop of more than 12% in April and May, followed by a similar dramatic reversal, as the system was unable to adapt, leaving containers in the wrong places, pushing freight rates to extraordinary heights.
New York-based Peter Baum Essex uses factories in China and Southeast Asia to make umbrellas for Costco, cotton bags for Walmart, and ceramics for Bed Bath and Bend.
6 months ago, he was paying about $ 2,500 to ship a 40-foot container to California.
"We just paid $ 6,000 to $ 7,000," Murphy said, stressing that "this is the highest freight rate I've seen in 45 years in this business."
Traffic congestion in crowded California ports
In the nearby ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, unloading has slowed due to the scarcity of dock workers and truck drivers, as the virus has infected some while forcing others into quarantine.
"The backlog of business is expected to remain until midsummer," Los Angeles Port Director Gene Seroka said at a recent board meeting.
Giant cranes reach Oakland, California to help unload cargo ships (New York Times)
Ships off Los Angeles have exhausted available anchorage points, and have resorted to so-called floating boxes, areas where ships float without restrictions, just as airplanes do when hovering over crowded airports.
And the big consumer brands - from sportswear maker Under Armor to Hasbro, the toy maker - are grappling with shipping bottlenecks.
Peloton cites port congestion as a factor behind its delay in delivering its advanced sportbikes.
To reduce wait times, Peloton has outlined plans to invest $ 100 million in air freight and express ocean freight.
But even in normal times, the cost of air freight is roughly 8 times that of sea freight, as most air freight is transported in the cargo hold of passenger jets.
Due to air travel restrictions, the places available for shipping are also restricted.
Some shippers rearranged their schedules and stopped in Oakland, California, 400 miles to the north, before proceeding to Los Angeles.
But the containers are stacked on top of each other on the ships in an arrangement specified by the destination, and a sudden change in plans means moving the piles like a game of Jenga.
Nobody knows how this will turn out
In recent weeks, shipping companies have enthusiastically transported empty containers to Asia, increasing availability there, according to data from Container Xchange, a consulting firm in Hamburg, Germany.
Some experts assume that as the vaccines increase and life returns to normal, Americans will shift their spending again, from goods to expertise, reducing the need for containers.
But even as this happens, retailers will start building up stocks for the holiday shopping boom.
Even as life returns to normal, it is not clear how long the delay in shipping across the world will be (New York Times)
A stimulus spending plan that passes through Congress could lead to hiring that could trigger another wave of buying, as previously unemployed people change old appliances and add them to their closet.
"There could be whole other subsets of consumers who were unable to consume," said Michael Brown, a container traffic analyst at KBW in New York.
"But you will probably see some potential shortage of supplies for some time," he added.
© The New York Times Foundation 2021