  To face pandemics like the one caused by COVID-19, resources such as personal
protection equipment (PPE) are needed to reduce the infection rate and protect
those in close contact with patients (Heymann and Shindo, 2020; Klompas et al.,
2021). The demand for those products increases exponentially as the number of
infected grows, outpacing any growth that local production facilities can
achieve (Ranney et al., 2020, Wu et al., 2020). Disruptions in the global
supply chain by closing factories or scaled-down transport routes can further
increase resource scarcity (McMahon et al., 2020). During the first phase of
the COVID-19 pandemic, we witnessed a reflex of `our people first' in many
regions, countries, and continents (Baldwin and Evenett, 2020). In this paper,
however, we show that a cooperative sharing mechanism can substantially improve
the ability to face epidemics. We present a stylized model in which communities
share their resources such that each can receive resources whenever a local
epidemic flares up. This can potentially prevent local resource exhaustion and
reduce the total number of infected cases. We also show that the success of
sharing resources heavily depends on having a sufficiently long delay between
the onset of epidemics in different communities. This means that a global
sharing mechanism should be paired with measures to slow down the spread of
infections from one community to the other. Our work is a first step towards
designing a resilient global supply chain mechanism that can deal with future
pandemics by design, rather than being subjected to the coincidental and
unequal distribution of opportunities per community at present.
