#People coming back to life after covid plus

The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.SHANGHAI: Traffic, pedestrians and joggers reappeared on the streets of Shanghai on Wednesday as China’s largest city began returning to normalcy amid the easing of a strict two-month Covid-19 lockdown that has drawn unusual protests over its heavy-handed implementation. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at for further information. We appreciate your talking with us today. Gene Seroka is executive director of the Port of Los Angeles. Retailers have postponed, canceled or otherwise rearranged orders just based on the plummeting demand that we witnessed over the last several months here in the United States. We're also in danger now of missing what we would call a traditional peak season. We have some signals that say folks and families are just buying the necessities to have kids reenter the classroom setting but not necessarily all the other works that go along with that - new outfits for the kids, new sneakers, et cetera. And now back-to-school seems pretty elusive, too, without a concrete plan as to what either in-classroom learning or distance learning will look like. And you look at fast fashion or spring fashion where we bypassed that completely, the spring holidays. SEROKA: Well, some things we totally whiffed on completely. SHAPIRO: And did it feel for the last few months like everything was down 20% across the board, or were some things coming in as normal and other things not at all? And with 40 million Americans out of work today, I think we're in a good place as the American economy attempts to reemerge. So all in all, we're operating at about 80% of normal. In addition to that, the DC and warehouse workers are being called in on less frequency or lower frequency than normal as well. What we're also seeing is less truckers and less cargo to haul. Number one, our longshore workforce and its shift work activity is down about 19% year over year and 20% compared to the three-year average, so trending in line with the declination of cargo. SEROKA: We've got a couple of looks at this. As of this moment, are people coming back on the job who had been furloughed? Like, what's the current state of play? The truck and rail connectors, the work on the ships are all happening flawlessly today. So the cargo fluidity through this port complex has been very good. And while we were at an uneven state with China facing its COVID exercise in the early part of the year and then ours later, we were able to work down some of the inventory in those DCs and warehouses. So we built up a lot of inventory at our distribution centers and warehouses. We had gone through several cycles, as you and I have spoken about before, concerning the tariffs and the milestones that were associated, which created importers having the need to expedite their cargo to avoid those tariff milestones. have the capacity to take what was being produced overseas? So when the Asian factories turned back to life but U.S. came back online over the last few months while the U.S.

SHAPIRO: You know, a lot of Asian markets that manufacture goods for the U.S. But realistically speaking, we continue to move along at about 20% downward trajectory compared to last year.

#People coming back to life after covid plus

We have approximately 10 ships at berth moving around, plus - that's on the container side, and then plus a variety of others. SEROKA: A little bit more like normal, but volume is still down year to date by about 20%. It wasn't exactly a ghost town, but it was a lot quieter. SHAPIRO: Last time you were on the program, I asked you to look out your fifth-floor window and tell us what you saw.

And now as some businesses start to open back up, we've got Gene Seroka back on the line from the Port of Los Angeles to tell us how things are looking today. That represents about 25% of our normal ship calls. GENE SEROKA: We've had 41 vessels canceled thus far from middle February through April 1. When I talked to the port's executive director Gene Seroka in early March, he told me business had already slowed way down. Last year, more than 9 million container units moved through there, packed with auto parts, clothes, furniture, electronics and more. The Port of Los Angeles is the nation's busiest.