A very high reliability of electricity supply—grid managers talk about the desirability of reaching six nines: with 99.9999 percent reliability there are only 32 seconds of interrupted supply in a year!—is imperative in societies where electricity powers everything from lights (be they in hospitals, along runways, or to indicate emergency escapes) to heart-lung machines and myriad industrial processes.[69] If the COVID-19 pandemic brought disruption, anguish, and unavoidable deaths, those effects would be minor compared to having just a few days of a severely reduced electricity supply in any
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