The other night I attended an excellent public meeting at Sydney University. It was about the whole Covid-19 coronavirus thing. There was a public health expert, other academics, politicians, the vice chancellor, and an ex-racial discrimination commissioner. The Chinese community have been having a hard time of it recently, due mainly to the good works of public health workers in Wuhan, China, who first identified the epidemic. (I have a theory that it may have been around elsewhere for some time before the Wuhan people did their bit - they were just more on-the-ball than their counterparts in other countries.)
The theme was 'Combatting viral panic, misinformation, and racism'.
Next day I called in to the Westleigh Aldi, and the panic was fabulously on show! All the toilet paper and facial tissues had gone. And most of the rice and pasta too!
The car park was fuller than I'd seen it before, and shoppers were discussing how they'd done the rounds of the Coles and Woolies stores before coming to this generally quiet one.
Fortunately we'd had an inking of this the day before, when we'd heard the radio discussion about why you didn't need to panic-buy. So we'd panic-bought!
