Common Sense Will Do More For Fighting Coronavirus Than Buying All The Toilet Paper

KY COVID-19 Cases At Total of 20 Statewide

by Darren Doyle:
The COVID-19 or coronavirus scare is real in the United States and is a serious threat to Americans, specifically older adults and people who have chronic medical conditions like heart disease, diabetes, and lung disease, according to the Centers for Disease Control, or the CDC. 

In order to fight the spread of coronavirus, the CDC has recommended that we all do the following: ​stock up on supplies, take every day precautions, avoid large crowds, and stay away from cruise and unnecessary air travel until the threat of the virus decreases. All of these recommendations make sense to most people and you don't have to be a medical professional to understand how they will help with containment of this condition.

Do you know what doesn't make sense? Panicking over toilet paper. Neither the CDC nor any other government agency (nor anyone in their right mind) has recommended buying 96 rolls of toilet paper to fight coronavirus. I've yet to read anywhere that the virus causes terminal diarrhea.

I did something last night I never thought I'd do in my entire life, which is pay $7.49 for one gallon of milk. We stopped at a Bowling Green store for a handful of items (including milk) but the place looked like it had been robbed. Bare shelves everywhere. Empty freezers and ransacked coolers were sad to see, along with racks in disarray. There were only two, gallon jugs of milk left in the store, and they were an organic brand that I'd never seen before. I got one of them. Why not both? Because someone else probably needed milk last night, too. We didn't need any toilet paper so we didn't even look for that.

I asked my wife, "What will this place look like if this virus actually hits here?" The truth is, people will turn on each other and fight over toilet paper. It's already happening in bigger cities. There were two reports earlier this week in both New York and Georgia of brawls breaking out in grocery stores. One led to a man being stabbed with a broken wine bottle in one of the store aisles.

I'll admit at first, I thought the NCAA and NBA cancellations along with others, were knee-jerk reactions, even ridiculous overreactions; however, I've learned more about the spreading of the virus and realize why those took place. The problem I have with those actions is that the national media has done a poor job of keeping the panic down. The public saw those cancellations that if the events continued, thousands of people would definitely spread or catch the virus, when in fact, it was actually to prevent a crisis before it starts. The thinking is simply this: if one person with the virus attends a sporting event with 30K others, then potentially, 30K people could catch and/or spread it. If there is no event, then that particular possibility is eliminated. The media didn't really explain this well and all the majority of the public saw was "March Madness cancelled because of coronavirus!"

It's the same with cancelling schools. Our school system is going to do what the state government recommends, and that's what the state folks recommended. They didn't cancel it because students are spreading the virus. It's so they can't. I still can't find anything that says we need to go buy all the toilet paper we can find.

So back to the toilet paper and $8 milk...

It's recommended to have around two weeks worth of supplies in the event there is a hard quarantine and we're stuck at home for that amount of time. Ok, fine--I get it. But if you use an entire roll of toilet paper every day for two weeks (which you don't), then you'll need an extra 14 rolls...not 96. A gallon of milk will last two weeks at the most after you buy it, so why would you hoard it? You won't need 5 gallons of milk, or 7 gallons of bleach, or 14 bottles of hand sanitizer, and you see where I'm going with this.

Calm down. Buy your normal amount of groceries. Wash your hands, use hand sanitizer, cover your mouth when you cough or sneeze and use some common sense. Health officials say it will get worse before it gets better, but we all can do our part to help. Nowhere in the equation does the hoarding of toilet paper help.

There have only been 20 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Kentucky with none of those being in our 10-county area. That means the virus has only infected 1 out of 223,200 people in KY. If we continue using common sense, we can keep those numbers low--without buying all the toilet paper.

So, I'd like to encourage us all not to freak out over what people are brawling about in New York or Georgia. If you need a gallon of milk, then try to find just the one gallon. If you need toilet paper, then please just buy your normal household quantity...not all of it.