Stop Panicking: stop
panic buying, and stop stockpiling food!
To anyone who,
before now, didn’t fully understand the concept of “the
tragedy of the commons”, look around you to what is happening in
Ireland during the spread of Covid-19, which the
World Health Organisation
has recently classified as a pandemic.
It sounds scary when something is classified with a word as
powerful as “pandemic”. Add a tense movie-thriller-sounding qualifying word to
pandemic, such as Covid-19, and there is plenty of reason to let your thoughts disappear
down a movie script dystopian style rabbit hole of horror scenarios.
The irony of the situation is that the only horror that is
likely to occur form panic-driven stockpiling of food and (bizarrely)
toiletries will be to the old, sick and vulnerable in society, who are the ones
that we must surely try our hardest to protect. They are after all the ones most
likely to suffer most during the pandemic.