OK, the Driver shortage is real, but I don't think this occured out of the blue over the last 2 weeks. It has to have been building for months. Nobody noticed migrant truckers were going home? Trucking companies didn't notice their payrolls were shrinking? What?
No contingency plans were prepared? Nobody in Da Goobermint thought, "Hey, if we don't have enough Drivers, we can't get the product to market."? Is everybody that stupid? Don't answer that. Rhetorical question.
So far, Covid has killed off less than 1% of the population, and that is skewed heavily towards old folks. So it's not dead truckers for the most part. Vax mandates could explain more, but do that many people really quit their jobs just to avoid getting jabbed?
The problem is of course economics. The price of the oil is going up, then if you add on top of that the price of labor going up the cost of petrol at the pump would have to rise rapidly to keep up. That of course is as bad as shortages.
Shortages or rapid price inflation, both are recipes for rising political unrest. Now the question is, where in the Industrialized world will this boil over first? The UK and the Eurozone seem like good candidates to me, so does China.
If people can't get/afford heating fuel this winter, I suspect something will break somewhere.
RE