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🚨 Power grids, banks, phone networks and food supplies just broke down in 12 countries in 7 days. This is what Covid looked like in week 1. A few cities. Small headlines. Nobody called it a crisis. 1/ 🇧🇷 Brazil: on Saturday night, a blackout hit part of Manaus, the biggest city in the Amazon, with about 2 million people. 2/ 🇺🇸 United States: more than 255 workers are on strike at a grocery warehouse in New Hampshire. No trucks are allowed out. That one warehouse supplies 600+ independent grocers. Hundreds across New England lost supply this week. Shelves are emptying. 3/ 🇪🇺 Europe: on Monday, supermarket fridges and freezers in at least 7 countries heated up overnight to as high as 50C (122F). 🇧🇪 🇪🇪 🇮🇪 🇫🇮 🇱🇺 🇳🇱 🇸🇪 Several chains say they were HACKED. A store near Brussels put up a sign: "Due to cyberattacks, there will be no products on the refrigerated or freezer shelves." Last month, hackers hit cooling units in up to 700 supermarkets in France. 4/ 🇺🇦 Ukraine: overnight into Saturday, Russia fired 172 drones and 36 ballistic missiles at Kyiv and nearby regions. They hit substations in 5 regions, including one that links 2 nuclear power plants to Kyiv. Kyiv has serious problems with power, water and heat. 5/ 🇯🇵 Japan: first the phones. NTT Docomo 5G SA users had trouble with calls and data for about 14 hours. On Friday, 128 credit unions in western Japan went down. ATMs, transfers and online banking stopped. Full service took about 5.5 hours to return. Counters failed at 3,430 branches. 6/ 🇵🇾 Paraguay: on Tuesday, the central bank seized Ueno Bank. 3 million customers, about 60% of adults, locked out. App, cards and ATMs off. $380 million of the state pension fund is stuck inside. Now zoom out. One substation links 2 nuclear plants to a capital. One warehouse feeds 600+ stores. One shared system runs 236 Japanese credit unions. Freezers in 7 countries overheated in ONE night. Hit one point and millions lose power, food or money at once. Covid emptied the streets. This is 12 countries in 7 days. Nobody is calling this a crisis yet. But British officials already plan for the day the lights go out. Britain has a "Black Sky" plan for a national blackout and is spending £70 million on high-altitude planes to restore phone and internet signal. It tells every household to keep 3 days of food and water. Its cyber chief: "When food isn't on the shelves, when lights aren't on, businesses have gone under." These stories get told one at a time. Follow me to see them all together, without the filter.