As soon as the pandemic started, airmail services stated to shut down. Normally, airmail packets “hitch a ride” on commercial airliners already making the trip.

As soon as the pandemic started, airmail services stated to shut down. Normally, airmail packets “hitch a ride” on commercial airliners already making the trip. But when those ceased, airmail service stopped. So what happened? All of the pending airmail got switched to “surface mail,” which is code for shipping on a boat. I had several packages go from an ETA measured in days to an ETA measured in weeks and months. I imagine that the whole thing cascaded from that. Online orders that would normally take a plane trip got redirected to the surface, and then the pipeline kept backing up. Until the world is connected and back to normal, bottlenecks like this will probably still exist.