Hoarding in advance of the coming plague

Source: CDC website.

According to this map from the CDC, updated today, March 10, the state where I live, Michigan, has not reported any cases of the corona virus that is threatening the world. [Update March 11: Michigan has now identified two cases of corona virus.]

Nevertheless, warnings bombard us. Perhaps as in New Rochelle, NY this afternoon, Michigan residents may be told to stay indoors to protect themselves as well as to reduce the speed of transmission of the disease. Perhaps we'll be too sick to go out and all the delivery services will cease to function. Perhaps our imaginations will run away and our fears will become even more overblown.

Unfortunately, advice-giving pundits have no real scenario for the situation that is most likely. Instead of trying to figure out something relevant, they are reproducing advice for preparation for storms, wars, unanticipated power shut-downs, and a variety of doomsday possibilities. An example is USA Today, which began with some semi-sensible advice, and continued by telling you to have a "Disaster Kit" with drinking water, flashlights, a hand-crank radio, matches, blankets, and so on. They discussed possibilities up to and including the need for fleeing to somewhere else. Even though they said these preparations were for other emergencies, they were clearly trying to create, not alleviate, the panic! (Link)

Fortunately, there's always someone who has a less gloomy view. I received the following from a friend in England who said the origin was in Bangalore --

The English are feeling the pinch in relation to the recent virus threat and have therefore raised their threat level from “miffed” to “peeved”. Soon, though, the level may be raised yet again to “irritated” or even “a bit cross”. They have not been “a bit cross” since the Blitz in 1940 when supplies of tea nearly ran out. The virus has been re-categorized from “tiresome” to a “damned nuisance”. The last time the British issued a “damned nuisance” warning level was in 1588 when threatened by the Spanish Armada.

Back to the gloomy present in the United States. Large numbers of people are stocking up their homes with medications, hand sanitizers, contagion-stopping gauze masks, toilet paper, and other seemingly relevant things. This behavior is occurring worldwide: almost every news source notes that in Australia, actual violence has occurred between women in supermarkets competing to buy depleted supplies of toilet paper, and has discussed the response of various governments wanting to ensure that hospitals will have surgical masks and that panic-driven shoppers don't buy all the pasta. The state of New York has put convicts to work in prison factories to make hand sanitizer for the government. A variety of rumors even discuss making your own hand sanitizer, though vodka isn't evidently the way to go: it's not high enough in alcohol.

People are also stockpiling food and other things:

"... the prospect of extended confinement at home has sent people scrambling for other items. Oat milk has become a hot commodity due to its longer shelf life than dairy-based products, suvivalist gear popularized on the National Geographic show 'Doomsday Preppers' is in demand and Hostess Brands Inc. reports sales of their famously indestructible snack, the Twinkie, are soaring." (Bloomsberg News, March 10, 2020)

The Bloomsberg News article title is: "Why Rational People Are Panic Buying as Coronavirus Spreads," but I can't really see any rational explanations for much of the behavior that's documented here. In fact, the article is mostly a discussion of the desperation most people feel to be in control of their circumstances:

"Psychologists view control as a fundamental human need. With a disease that’s highly infectious and can turn deadly, this epidemic violates a sense of control in fundamental ways. Unless policy makers can find a way to restore that feeling, the cycle of panic buying, hoarding and scarcity only stands to escalate."

Stacks of toilet paper for sale at Costco last week.

Some people make themselves feel more in control by buying things they will probably never use. Some people are simply taking advantage and buying up things they can resell on e-bay or amazon and make unconscionable profits. Some of course are trying to be rational -- toilet paper may be more rational since you won't have to throw it out in 6 months. Presumably, you'll keep using it as long as you live, and anyway, you really don't want to be without it in case of whatever part of the projected apocalypse you are worried about.I understand how hard it is to resist panic.

I'm completely convinced that the electricity and water supplies will not be interrupted by an outbreak of coronavirus, but I see that one might need to stay indoors, and that market access might become difficult. Personally, I have laid in a higher-than-usual supply of a few shelf-stable foods and frozen foods, such as boxed soup, crackers, canned tuna, and cookies.

And of course I bought toilet paper when I went to Costco. In fact, there were mountains of toilet paper available there but they told me that they had been out for 4 days last week, and that a truckload had just arrived the day I happened to shop there. Don't panic!

My father told us a story that I'm thinking about now. During World War I, he was a young child. His native village in what's now the country of Belarus was in the path of the German army that was about to invade Russia. The people of the village knew it was going to be a difficult winter (I think it was in 1914 or 1915). Food supplies were always scarce as the winter went on in these very primitive villages. His mother, he told us, wanted to be prepared for the coming troubles, so she filled up part of their house with potatoes and built a wall to hide them. This seems to have kept them from starvation. Eventually, they were evacuated to some type of refugee camp to be out of the battleground. That's all I know. Things could be worse. Actually, things did get much worse: the Nazi armies arrived in 1941, and 1942 all the Jews remaining in the village were slaughtered. Fortunately, by that time my father had been in the US for many years, though his relatives weren't all survivors.

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