Is There Really a Toilet Paper Shortage in Times of Corona?

Mass panic buying due to the COVID-19 situation has really created the sort of hysteria you would see in post-apocalyptic movies. 

It is clearly all doom and gloom and many people have already started stockpiling essentials that would be needed the most if the situation requires people to stay at home for weeks. And while it does bode well for the consumer industry, the fact that people are literally hoarding things has made it hard to meet the demand. 

Across the world, shelves that once had mountains of toilet rolls have been emptied. People have been seen fighting for the loo roll across the globe. 

#ToiletPaperPanic and #ToiletPaperApocalypse

While you would like to be critical of how people are going crazy, you have to say that we are witnessing a natural behavioural response to a natural disaster. 

“Panic buying and hoarding of supplies is obviously not desirable, but it’s understandable, particularly when people see images of cities, regions and even whole countries in lockdown,” Michael Baker, professor of public health at the University of Otago in Wellington, New Zealand, told Al Jazeera.

And then again, this is perhaps the first time since the Second World War that we have seen a situation such as this so people are perhaps reacting to it just to make sure that they have the right tools to avoid losing the fight against a foe that has already taken so many lives around the world.