Now, economic demolition and the enormous U.S. coronavirus death toll are driving a government-wide strive to move U.S. production and supply bond dependency away from China, even if it goes to other more friendly nations as an alternative, current and former senior U.S. administration officials said.

“We’ve been working on [reducing the reliance of our supply chains in China] over the last few years but we are now turbo-charging that initiative,” Keith Krach, undersecretary for Economic Growth, Energy and the Environment at the U.S. State Department told Reuters.

“I think it is essential to understand where the critical areas are and where critical bottlenecks exist,” Krach said, adding that the matter was important to U.S. security and one the government could make known new action on soon.

The U.S. Commerce Department, State and other agencies are looking for means to push companies to move both bearing out and manufacturing out of China. Tax incentives and potential re-shoring subsidies are among measures put in place to pervade changes, the current and former officials told Reuters.

“There is a whole of government push on this,” said one. Agencies are probing which manufacturing should be deemed “essential” and how to make these goods outside of China.

“This moment is a perfect storm; the pandemic has crystallized all the worries that people have had about doing business with China,” said another senior U.S. official.

Source____WASHINGTON (Reuters)