Clarification: I understand this is a highly-contagious upper respiratory infection that can kill. I’m clear on the whole epidemiology of it.
I understand why sick people need to be kept separate from healthy people.
I even know that an effective vaccine will take at least 12-18 months before it is available to use.
Health officials have suggested we may need to shelter-in-place, in other words, STAY HOME for weeks, to halt the spread of this disease.
The locusts have descended upon the stores. Shelves are empty of hand sanitizers, alcohol wipes, disinfectant wipes. I imagine all the cough and cold remedies are cleared from the planet.
Please tell me WHY folks have found it necessary to clean out the big box stores of toilet paper?
As far as I can tell, coronavirus does not give you the gut rumbles.
Maybe folks want to pack long strips of TP in their snotty noses? Or maybe if Granny kicks the bucket during shelter-in-place, she can be wrapped up like a mummy?
Will it take a long time before the paper industry is up and running? Is a TP shortage predicted?
Do people expect to barter with rolls of TP?
If I were inclined to prepare for Doomsday, II would stockpile booze. Actually, no…my choice of hoard would be COFFEE, because without coffee, I would be inclined to kill people.
Soooooo. Why are people buying up forests of toilet paper?
And…what would YOU tuck away for a shelter-in-place scenario?
~VOW
Even though Chinese invented paper, they aren’t a major producer of toilet tissue, so there’s no worry of a supply-chain failure. But consider the prospect of being forcibly quarantined-in-place for a few weeks. I’m in a forest; I can always shit in the woods and wipe off with madrone or oak leaves. But (sub)urban folks in apartment blocks and townhouses may lack that option. They’ll want a firm supply of TP - and hope the water keeps flowing.
How to prepare? We’re in PG&E country where proactive power shutoffs are the new normal. We had stocked up on packaged foods to be ready for the next outage but we just got a generator so we’re filling the fridge again. To be virus prudent, we need more canned and boxed stuff. Our parents got by through the Great Depression on barrels of potatoes. Let’s see, where could we store a barrel?
Some people are engaged in panic buying. There’s often a run on the stores when there’s a public health threat. Others are using the opportunity to restock.
We live in an earthquake zone so we already have several weeks’ supplies. We bought an extra pack of toilet paper and refilled the pantry with our usual staples (rice, garbanzos, shelf-stable tofu, canned tuna, canned pineapple, etc.). We’ve filled our prescriptions and made sure we have aspirin and a thermometer that works. We already have water on hand. We do earthquake/snow resupply quarterly anyway.
My spouse and I have jobs that have a better-than-average chance of exposure and I need to be at several different medical facilities over the next few weeks for oncology and related appointments that can’t be delayed. Last week I was exposed to hundreds of college students. Both of us work with medically vulnerable people. If you’re quarantined or ill and stuck at home for 2 weeks or more, or if you can’t get to the store because you’re in a high risk category and shouldn’t go out in public, or if the bus drivers are all ill and there’s no way to get to the store, it’s nice to have enough toilet paper.
It doesn’t sound like it’s highly contagious. Although very deadly compared to most flus.
I guess they don’t want to buy toilet paper while sick, which is something they have to have, unless they’ve got a bidet. (Shouldn’t they also be buying tons of canned food? And installing bidets?)
Toilet paper is one of those weird things that people seem to panic buy whenever there is a perceived crisis on the horizon. For some reason, TP is also susceptible to panics over perceived shortages.
I have been pondering this as well over the past few days.
Some ideas:
TP is a large, bulky item. When shoppers are in a store, they are unlikely to notice if there are no canned refried beans on the shelf. They are likely to notice a shopping aisle with a big gap where the TP used to be. Even if there are 10,000 rolls out back, the lack of TP in aisle 5 gives them a start. So if they see some being brought out from the back, they grab some.
Likewise, if you see 10 shoppers going out of the store with big packs of TP, you’ll wonder what the heck is going on. This is noticeable. (The other day, I saw every single shopper at Costco going out with a 48 pack of TP. Or two. Or on one case, 4. The dude had a HUUUUGE pile of TP. It was noticeable) When you get in the store, you wonder why everyone was stocking up. So you think you’d better stock up too.
Essentially, shoppers are like lemmings, and big packs of TP are very noticeable on the store shelves and in the carts.
OP: lots of people use toilet paper instead of facial tissues for sneezing.
Basically the grocery store industry is set up on a just-in-time basis: while it looks like there is lots of stuff in a supermarket, the inventory turns over in not that many days.
When people decide to stockpile food, they will stockpile thousands of different products. Toilet paper is something everyone needs–and there are just a few brands there to stockpile.
I think a lot of people just want to do something. Viruses are scary and the illusion of some kind of control or at least preparation is comforting.
Plus panic buying just takes on a life of its own after a while; people hear shops are selling out and think ‘crap, I’d better get some before all the idiots buy all of it’… Certainly round here, the shelves didn’t start emptying until a few days after the media started reporting that people were clearing the shops out.
In addition to the reasons given above, it’s easy to stock up on toilet paper because it is relatively cheap and never goes bad. If I make a mistake and buy vast quantities of cold medicine, eventually the expiration date will pass and I’ll have wasted my money, so I might hesitate before buying vast quantities that I don’t know for sure if I’ll ever need. Toilet paper, on the other hand … if it takes me 5 years to use it up, it’ll still be good. The only real cost is storage space, which for a lot of people isn’t an issue.
nitpick It’s a lower respiratory infection - less runny nose and sneezing and more chest congestion and coughing.
First: running out of toilet paper really sucks.
Second: because the stores are out of hand sanitizer.
When there’s an emergency people want to DO SOMETHING. It’s how we’re wired. So in this case we go out and gather resources which isn’t inherently bad. But then we find some of the resources we want are unobtainable. So a certain number of people load up on what they CAN buy.
Before Sears catalogs and someone else’s bibles and hymnals, we had corncobs. Keep in mind that a buccaneer sounds like costly corn but used cobs can be washed and re-used.
Whenever I go to Sam’s Club I buy a few things, among them toilet paper, paper towels, and laundry detergent. I fill a cart with two giant bags of TP, one giant bag of paper towels, and two big jugs of laundry detergent.