A glimpse of the future. I have been to the pandemic land and its a living HELL!
Coronavirus concerns are sending shoppers into panic-buying mode across the country. Bare shelves and frayed nerves were on full display over the weekend at Bay Area grocery stores as the coronavirus continued to spread. Shoppers described chaotic scenes, many of which were shared on social media: stacks of rice and toilet paper snatched up within seconds, checkout lines that snaked through entire stores, and jam-packed parking lots reminiscent of Christmas Eve. It’s the latest ripple effect of the outbreak of a still mysterious respiratory illness that in the past two months has caused more than 89,000 people around the world to fall ill. The virus that only a few weeks ago was mostly confined to China now has recorded cases in more than 60 nations.
With numbers climbing and no vaccine available, institutions such as the World Health Organization and the United States’ Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in recent days have warned that people should be prepared for a pandemic situation, including the possibility of having to stay confined in their homes for one or two weeks.
The results of that warning could be glimpsed in the depleted shelves and long lines in stores this weekend. “You see the videos of people loading water into their cars during hurricanes, stacks and stacks of them. That’s what was going on,” said Jeff Christner of Pacifica, who had an unexpectedly long trip with his wife to Costco in South San Francisco on Friday evening. “We couldn’t even believe it.” “People were panic-buying,” Christner said. The self-proclaimed “preparedness freak” managed to buy some of the small items on his list — batteries, canned chicken and medicine — but found many empty boxes. “I honestly couldn’t believe it. I didn’t expect to see what I saw.” People working at such stores played down the pandemonium, but agreed that it was not a normal weekend. “On a usual Saturday we have 3,000 customers. This Saturday we had 600 come through the first hour,” said a worker at the Costco in Richmond. “They’re buying the essentials — the news is telling us we need to be stocked up for 30 days.” Food products with a long shelf life were in demand, such as pasta or Spam or canned ham. The selection of rice available early Sunday afternoon consisted of several dozen 20-pound bags of basmati rice near the checkout counters: “Usually we’ll have six different varieties, with three to four pallets of each,” said the employee. The scene playing out with food hoarding is a more frenzied case of what has occurred in recent weeks in hardware stores, where face masks are all but impossible to find.