Have you forgotten the Great Toilet Paper Riots of 2020?
We're having trouble surviving a (reasonably mild by comparison) pandemic as a species that has killed millions! Now multiply what we've seen by several orders of magnitude. With all the greed and guns in the USA... oof.
I live in an affluent area that gets hurricanes. You know when a storm is coming because certain shelves of goods are wiped out — non-perishable items, bread, water.
When the pandemic hit, these were the same items people hoarded (in addition to toilet paper). Why? The pandemic wasn’t going to shut off a fridge/freezer. It wasn’t going to disable the water system. People reacted in the only way they knew for a crisis they experience often — not what the actual situation was.
It served as a reminder that when a major, acute crisis hits, most people are not going to be thinking rationally. They’re going to rely on whatever instincts have been developed.
I can’t even imagine what extremes would result from a fast-moving crisis like a nuclear explosion.
Early in the pandemic we didn't know the degree to which the supply chains would be shut down. I mean, you had footage from Wuhan where things really were seriously locked down and people basically didn't leave their houses. I'm not surprised all the beans and rice and pasta and oats vanished from the shelves.
In the end our version of "shutdown" was much milder, but we didn't know that at the beginning. We were rather fortunate that delta variant didn't come along until our vaccination program was well on its way.
We're having trouble surviving a (reasonably mild by comparison) pandemic as a species that has killed millions! Now multiply what we've seen by several orders of magnitude. With all the greed and guns in the USA... oof.