Tiny strand of RNA causes toilet paper panic

Owen Epstein

“Invisible Invaders” is a science fiction movie released in 1959. It tells the story of invisible aliens from outer space who threaten world domination. A surrender ultimatum is relayed to Washington DC but dismissed as fake news and the messenger declared a crank. The invasion materialises, chaos ensues and all attempts to defeat the invisible invader fail. Eventually, coincidence rather than scientific endeavour leads to the discovery that loud sound offers lethal defence. Sound guns eventually neutralise and destroy the invisible invasion force and humankind survives. 

Wind forward 60 years to 31^st December 2019. The Chinese city of Wuhan announces the arrival of an invisible invader causing a cluster of severe lung infections. The unseen intruder is rapidly isolated, and, on 12th January 2020, Chinese scientists publish its gene sequence. The sub-microscopic strand of RNA is characterised as a respiratory coronavirus never encountered by humankind. There is speculation that like emergence of SARS and MERS in 2002 and 2012, the launchpad was zoonotic spread, perhaps from a bat to an unfortunate pangolin illegally trapped and then traded to humans in the wet Huanan market in Wuhan. By 13^th January, the virus had crossed the border to Thailand and on 22^nd January, Chinese authorities announced that this novel respiratory virus, SARS-CoV-2 (nicknamed Covid-19), was spread by droplets expelled by sneezing or coughing. Public health officials, epidemiologists and microbiologists must have felt the hairs on their skin rise at the thought that our human species, lacking immune defence against this novel virus, might rapidly be overwhelmed.

Their predictions soon began to unfold. On 31^st January, two infections were reported from Rome and by early February, the virus had infiltrated Australia, Singapore, Japan, South Korea, Spain, India, Vietnam, the United States and the Philippines. On 4^th February, Wuhan breached 10,000 cases, signalling the high rate of human-to-human transmission, and on the same day, the first infection was reported in Belgium. By February 6^th, three patients had been identified in the UK and soon thereafter, case reports emerged from Germany and France. Whilst small numbers had been identified in Europe and the USA, by 9^th February more than 40,000 cases had been reported from China. The minute single strand of RNA was staging a blitzkrieg across Europe and into the Americas, leaving a trail of cough, fever and the first reports of mortality.

On March 11^th, the World Health Organisation declared the invasion a pandemic, a term used to describe the spread of a contagious epidemic across several countries or continents. History books had etched two iconic pandemics in the public mind. The 1346 Bubonic plague or ‘Black Death’ claimed between 75-100 million victims and the 1918 influenza pandemic, misnamed the ‘Spanish flu’, infected a third of the world’s population causing an estimated 50 million deaths. As the Covid-19 pandemic occupied country after country, public anxiety was ramped up by the 24-hour news cycle and the viral effect of social media. Every registered infection and death became headline news, spreading fear faster than the virus itself. On 23^rd January, whilst most of mankind conducted business as usual, the Chinese central government ordered a strict lockdown on Wuhan citizens, hoping to isolate the virus and prevent its rampant spread across China and beyond. On 30^th January, in scenes reminiscent of the “Invisible Invader”, President Trump disregarded World Health Organisation warnings of the looming global health emergency and called health secretary Azar’s cautions “alarmist”.  As the pandemic continued to rip through industrialised and developing nations, most authorities imposed the Chinese quarantine model as the only method to contain the infection and reduce transmission.

In mid-February, before general lockdown, and as scientists and politicians focused their attention on the unfolding healthcare drama, an anxious public exhibited strange behaviour. Stockpiling food and other provisions is a normal human response to impending disaster, but panic buying huge stores of toilet paper is bizarre. Toilet tissue panic was first reported from Hong Kong, where an armed gang conducted a 600-roll toilet paper heist. Headline news, pictures and video footage of supermarket shelves emptied of toilet tissue flashed across the globe, triggering panic buying across Australia, Asia, Europe and the Americas.  A sub-microscopic strand of RNA had provoked worldwide toilet roll mania.

There was a precedent for toilet tissue panic. On December 19, 1973, Johnny Carson, the legendary host of “The Tonight Show”, announced in jest that there was an acute shortage of toilet paper. Millions of American shoppers took to the streets, swamping grocery stores and stockpiling rolls of toilet tissue. Despite calls for calm and restraint, for four months, toilet paper disappeared from shelves as quickly as they were stacked. The event was documented by Brian Gerston in his short film, “The Great Toilet Paper Scam”, available to watch on YouTube.

There are many theories on the heuristic origins of toilet paper panic including the subconscious affective association of illness threat with disgust and the cleansing practice of anal hygiene and handwashing. Fear of missing out, or FOMO, offers another explanation. This is the sense of anxiety and apprehension that emerges when individuals fear exclusion from satisfying activities enjoyed by others. Perhaps scrambling for punnets of toilet paper was a subconscious expression of the fear of being “caught with your pants down” whilst the tissue paper hoarders enjoyed maintained dignity.

The Covid-19 virus pandemic unlocked an entire array of involuntary and voluntary human responses to danger. Observing and understanding human behaviour when faced with illness anxiety, sometimes magnified by fears of invisible and untreatable invaders, provides a launchpad to develop birds eye view of behaviour when faced with threat. The pandemic should provide humankind’s peacemakers, economists, anthropologists, sociologists. politicians and healthcare providers a model to reconciles human behaviour with the hard-wired primordial drive to seek safe sanctuary.