Yes, pre-packaged foods are distributed too. Just an hour before sunset , volunteers stand at most traffic lights rushing to distribute these packages. But even the packages themselves can spread the disease. I think if the CV mess continues to Ramadhan, this kind of distribution will be banned by gov.

OK, let me share with you other news about people who trying to make a change.

# An Iraqi young man in his tailor shop, sees the severe shortage of face masks, so he starts sewing and freely distributing face masks made of cloth. I don't know how effective they are but the are definitely better than nothing, and they are washable and reusable.

# A teacher has a simple YouTube channel, sees the ban on schools and works day and night to produce more educational videos, and learns how to make them better quality.

# Several hotel owners in Iraq gave their hotels to gov to use as quaranteens.

The list goes on and on and on.
Great spirit for tough times.

As we've seen with TP hoarders and the dude that bought up 18,000 bottles of hand sanitizer, there are always going to be some bad apples that try to profit off of the misery of others. But I believe pretty strongly in the fundamental goodness of humanity. For every bad apple I've seen ten folks looking for ways to help.

Indeed, I consider that excessive purchasing of toilet paper, hand sanitiser, or anything else during an emergency is anti social as others are thereby deprived. I avoid doing this.

I have a large supply of toilet paper, and of many other commodities, but these were obtained years ago and simply provided a little welcome extra trade. I very much doubt that my historic bulk purchase deprived anyone else.

I had only very limited supplies of hand sanitiser, but did have large stocks of the ingredients to make my own.

We went to Costco this morning at 10:00 AM expecting a crowd, but we needed a few things (Not TP). The line to get in went almost entirely around the building!!!!!!! Costco was only letting in 10 at a time. People are nuts!

This too shall pass. Once this initial hoarding is over and people realize they don’t have storage space for additional 24/48 rolls of TP and their freezers are full of the frozen peas I couldn’t buy yesterday, things should return to normal.

I’ve been buying a little here, little there for weeks and then suddenly this past weekend the panic lightbulb turned on for so many people all at once — very annoying.

If I don't die of COVID-19 and have the opportunity to look back at this thread in a month or three, it may be that in hindsight my attitude was pollyannaish but I think the worst of the panic won't last long. That is unless, of course, the death toll surges exponentially. In in Bozeman we've had the standard run on TP, sanitizer and all the common military ammo calibers (eg 9mm and 5.56) but there's still food in the stores and people aren't acting completely insane. Hopefully that doesn't go out the window once we get our first confirmed case.