An executive of the world's largest shipping company says he has never seen anything like the current global disruption in the sector caused by the Covid-19 pandemic.

Around the planet, the pandemic has dramatically disrupted trade, driving up the cost of shipping goods and adding a fresh challenge to the global economic recovery.

The virus has thrown off the choreography of moving cargo from one continent to another, according to the New York Times.

Containers that carried millions of masks to countries in Africa and South America early in the pandemic remain there, empty and uncollected because shipping carriers have concentrated their vessels on their most popular routes — those linking North America and Europe to Asia.

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” said Lars Mikael Jensen, head of Global Ocean Network at A.P. Moller-Maersk, the world’s largest shipping company.

“All the links in the supply chain are stretched. The ships, the trucks, the warehouses.”