1. A few tentative thoughts about supply chain risk and the lessons from coronavirus so far.

2. One popular takeaway I've seen has been that global supply chains are bad, and sourcing from China is worse, so the lesson from coronavirus is we should relocate our supply chains away from China - especially for medical supplies, but really for everything.

3. I don't think this simple takeaway matches the facts.

4. At first, when the outbreak was focused in China, and China shut down many factories, there was real concern that key inputs from China could be shut off, leaving US and other foreign companies high and dry.

5. I know this was a big concern in the pharmaceutical industry, where global drug-makers rely on basic chemicals made in China to produce drugs.

6. This was a real concern, and in some cases revealed how entire industries had unwittingly become dependent on a single source that could be disrupted.

7. In the end, though, the outbreak in China appears to have receded and those factories are back to work. Shipments are moving, and the threat of running out of needed imports from China has receded. That's not the main challenge we face right now.

8. In fact, the course of the virus globally has shown that supply chain disruptions can ripple worldwide and arise anywhere - even if the outbreak originated in China, the disruption isn't necessarily limited to China.

9. So while a greater awareness of supply chain risk is certainly a valid lesson from coronavirus, it's less about the risk inherent in any one locale (like China) and more about the need to diversify supply chains.

10. But even that isn't quite so simple. While people may imagine the shortages in medical supplies and equipment we face right now stem from a reliance on imports, that's really not the immediate problem.

11. The immediate problem is a massive surge in unusual demand - whether for masks or ventilators - that completely outstrips normal capacity, wherever it exists.

12. The solution to that is either plan ahead and stockpile, or have production capacity that is easier to scale up. But diversifying supply chains to multiple locations, to reduce disruption risk, may be at least somewhat in tension with optimizing rapid scalability.