Empty shelves do indeed look really grim. I wonder if the panic buying is spread by Facebook meme waves with a rolling menu of doomsday must-haves. It started with toilet paper, then tissues. Then pasta, rice, tins of soup, baked beans and spaghetti. Antibacterial soap, antibacterial cleaning wipes, antibacterial laundry liquid. Indeed anything with a label including a word prefixed by "anti". Then flour, but of course you can't do much with flour alone, so it spread to eggs and milk. But hang on: the eggs and milk will expire within a month. Shouldn't we be stockpiling chickens and cows? Never mind; one step at a time. Bleach - obviously. Vinegar, and come to think of it: what are we going to do with all this pasta? We'll need jars of sauces, tinned tomatoes, mince. Oh! We'll need a chest freezer! Several! And an electricity source. I know; we can burn some of this toilet paper in a steam generator, freeing up more storage space for dog food, paracetamol, chicken necks, batteries…