The slump in production capacity in China helped to ease logjams at US ports that were created during the pandemic.
But as manufacturing resumes in Shanghai and more goods are shipped out, ports across the US East and West coasts are likely to be strained again, experts told Insider.
"As soon as these lockdowns end and you have all this capacity actually being moved at the same time, it will definitely, I would say, create new issues, and most probably it will be issues on both sides of the US," Alex Charvalias, a supply-chain lead at the vessel-tracking site MarineTraffic, said.
And with no structural changes at US ports expected in terms of truckers, workers, and port facilities, those ports won't have the capacity to deal with a sudden rise in ships arriving, experts said.
"If demand is not changing, backlogs will continue, because the reason for the backlogs is lack of transport inland, lack of labor and facilities to unstuff the containers," Stanley Smulders, the director of marketing and commercial at the global-shipping company Ocean Network Express, said.