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What about an aluminium pipe factory? You don't know if they are used to build medical ventilators or cpu coolers. The supply chains are complex. You have dependencies all over the place. What if a nurse' car breaks down. Is a car repair shop non essential?

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That is the problem with free markets

In a centrally planned economy all supply chains would be stored in one large database and it would be easy to identify all essential supply chains.

But the long queues in front of the grocery stores would be terrible for containing the propagation the virus.

With centrally planned errands one could avoid all queues

Instead going to the grocery store, you report to the central planer what you need. It then creates an errand plan, when you should leave your apartment, when to arrive at the grocery store and when you have to leave the grocery store. Thereby making sure that not too many people are at the store during the same interval.

> That is the problem with free markets

> In a centrally planned economy all supply chains would be stored in one large database and it would be easy to identify all essential supply chains.

Not really, because the real supply chain in centrally planned economies is black market.

So maybe rather than centrally planned economies, we should have centrally observed economies.

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