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With supply chain issues ramping up the stress for consumers, we asked experts in the Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics in the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences how they thought fears about low supplies and consumer behavior might flavor the holidays.

In the latter months of 2019, a novel coronavirus probably leaped from a yet-unknown animal in central China into a human. Some speculate that SARS-CoV-2 leaked from a laboratory in Wuhan, China. But evidence suggests that it’s far more likely that the virus was a natural “zoonotic” leap from animal to human. The resulting COVID-19 pandemic has killed hundreds of thousands of Americans, including more than 23,000 Georgians, and mutated into dangerous new variants.