“China is the world’s manufacturing floor, but when the logistics are broken, raw materials cannot get in, shipments cannot get out, the impact is enormous,” Liu said. “We are paying a higher price this time than during the Wuhan lockdown. Back then, it was only one city, but this time the whole supply chain is being affected.”

Apple supply chain hit by lockdowns in Shanghai, Kunshan

Liu’s ordeal is not an isolated case in China’s logistics service industry, which has been inundated by draconian lockdowns since March that have become a new normal in many parts of the country, after Shanghai started to confine virtually all residents at home more than two weeks ago.

China’s truck traffic has dropped 40 per cent since mid-March, while truck movement around Shanghai is down to about 15 per cent of its normal level, Ernan Cui, an analyst at Hong Kong-based research firm Gavekal, wrote in a note on Wednesday. The development has posed serious risks to production activities nationwide, as roads account for about 70 per cent of the country’s domestic freight transport.

“There are fewer and fewer truck drivers available who do not have a travel history that comes with some kind of Covid exposure risks,” Cui wrote. “The time to complete deliveries has been greatly extended and the cost of trucking has risen significantly.”

A recent paper published jointly by researchers from the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Tsinghua University, Zhejiang University and Princeton University found that a month of full lockdown in China’s top four cities – Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou and Shenzhen – would reduce the national real gross domestic product by 8.6 per cent.

All four cities have currently imposed stringent travel restrictions.

One of the regions worst hit by logistics disruptions is the Yangtze River Delta, a major manufacturing and export hub. Any country that manufactures for export is reliant on domestic and international logistics, and rising delivery backlogs could have a serious impact on China’s export economy, said Lian Hoon Lim, Hong Kong managing director at global consultancy AlixPartners.

A manager at a Shanghai-based logistics company specialising in deliveries from China to Southeast Asia, who only gave his surname as Fu because he was not authorised to speak to the media, said that before 2020, around 800 to 1,200 trucks crossed the border between China and Vietnam every day.

“In recent weeks, there have been only 30 to 60,” he said.

To comply with pandemic measures, Fu said his company has to adopt a so-called drop-and-pull mode to get containers across a border. This involves a Chinese driver pulling a container truck to a tariff-free zone, where another Chinese driver takes the wheel and steers the vehicle to the border. There, a Vietnamese driver removes the container and trailer and reattaches them to a local truck.

“This is mainly to prevent Chinese and Vietnamese drivers from entering each other’s freight yard,” Fu said, but the arrangement also significantly raises transport costs.

Before the pandemic, all it took was a driver and a truck to move freight across the border. Now each journey also requires two additional truck heads and two more drivers. Fu said his company has been paying 10,000 to 20,000 yuan (US$1,570 to US$3,140) more for each container, and the firm has been making losses since November.

Shanghai’s Covid-19 lockdown horizon extended by another record day of cases

The pain from Covid-19 restrictions is also felt by Mila Shen, a textile merchant selling to India. In the past, she usually had the same driver pick up empty containers from the Shanghai Port, fetch packages from her warehouse, and transport them back to the port.

As the Omicron outbreak rages on, however, many drivers have seen their health codes – a digital system that dictates whether a person needs to quarantine – turn from green to yellow, barring them from moving about freely, Shen said.

With or without a green code, some drivers are simply not receiving assignments.

Demand for logistics services has plummeted, as factories have been forced to shut down or operate in a closed-loop mode that confines workers within campuses.

Zhao Xubing, a truck driver in the Suzhou-administered city Zhangjiagang, near Shanghai, said he and his five colleagues have barely had to transport welding metals since April 1, as Suzhou ramps up public health measures to fend off incoming cases from Shanghai.

Shanghai stretched to breaking point under dynamic zero-Covid

China’s central government issued a special notice this week, ordering local authorities not to set up unnecessary roadblocks. But cities are likely to maintain strict travel restrictions as long as they are still under pressure to follow the dynamic zero-tolerance approach towards the coronavirus, said Gavekal’s Cui.

“Until the central government has the confidence to authorise a broader relaxation in Covid policies, the recovery of transport and supply chains will be incomplete,” she wrote.

Some truck drivers said they are coming close to burnout. Liu said his crew has been suffering from sleep deprivation because of the extra work hours they have been putting in, which increases safety risks. “Just think about it, after waiting for a day on the expressway, you still have to go to the factory and come back. You don’t have time to rest,” he said.

“Logistics may be seen as an unimportant element of trade in regular days. But without it, there is no trade.”