[senordevnyc]

Actually, the biggest problem for a very long time has been people downplaying the risks and dangers of this pandemic, questioning the numbers, wondering whether it’s really that bad, and castigating any amount of preparation as “panic”, a word which has become meaningless in its overuse.

[chrisseaton]

But we know we're creating more artificial problems for ourselves!

There was no actual food supply issue. But people have panicked due to unchecked bad information and now we do have a real food supply issue, at the very worst time to have one!

Maybe if someone had said to people 'hang on that's not quite right there's plenty of food being supplied' we'd have one less problem.

[gpm]

I don't get this idea that "panic buying" is necessarily bad. We are moving goods from communal locations to people's homes. We aren't destroying goods. Once/if the virus does arrive in a large volume at the location we would greatly rather that people stayed at home and ate food they had stockpiled than that they then went to the grocery store. Dealing with shipping extra products now (while a very small fraction of people are infected), or just having shelves in stores be slightly bare, seems like a worthwhile tradeoff.

There are some questionable cases, like people hording years worth of toilet paper (which can cause real temporary shortages and actually significantly inconvenience people), but everyone stockpiling a months worth of food seems like a good thing.

[chrisseaton]

> I don't get this idea that "panic buying" is necessarily bad. We are moving goods from communal locations to people's homes.

Not to everyone's homes. For example: old people who can't rush to the shops and elbow their way through the queue may get nothing.

[gpm]

I'm not talking about behavior that involves any form of physical violence or physically moving quickly. Such behavior is almost certainly inappropriate under any and all circumstances. Humans suck so I guess I can assume that it has happened somewhere, but that's not the behavior I've been observing.

I am talking about buying x times as much as you usually do when you go grocery shopping to build up a stockpile, including a larger supply of food that you can store for a long period of time (canned/frozen/dry goods).

Edit: And yes, it doesn't include everyone's homes. In particular it doesn't include the homes of people who didn't do this. Unless the store is literally bare it does still help those people though, because it means there are less people in the store who might transmit the virus to them.

[lukeck]

Having more food at home and therefore not needing to go out as often is good for the people that are physically and financially able to. Those that can’t - people on low or no income, homeless, elderly, disabled and sick are some of the groups that are most vulnerable to this virus. For them, other people’s panic buying has caused more than an inconvenience.

[gpm]

> For them, other people’s panic buying has caused more than an inconvenience.

How? What has it done to "more than inconvenience" them? Specifically what has it done to them except possibly cause them to have to buy different food today because they got a bit unlucky and the store is currently running low on what they normally eat?

On the flip side it means that when they go shopping in the future, when lots of people are sick, there will be less people at the store. This reduces their chance of infection. Do you really think the inconvenience today outweighs that benefit, even if we just look at them in isolation instead of looking at the cost/reward to society as a whole?

[newman314]

Panic buying also usually implies long lines of people waiting in close proximity to each other leading to additional vectors of potential infection. So yeah, no.

[gpm]

I'd rather long lines today when very few people are infected, than having lines tomorrow when many people are infected. We can sacrifice a little R0 when the base population of infected is small to get a smaller R0 when the base population is large.

[X6S1x6Okd1st]

R0 doesn't change. R changes.

basic reproductive number vs effective reproductive number

[james_s_tayler]

Well a few people moved some of the goods to their homes and today when my wife went to do the shopping she phoned me in tears saying the entire vegetable section was empty. Same with the canned goods section. Same with the bread.

So... We couldn't get any of those to our home. That's kind of a problem.

People just need to chill.