The year started with plague, maybe plague is too strong a word. However, the surgical masks have been low in stock and people have been panicking because of the Coronavirus. With no cure in current sight, people will panic and start to abuse the staff selling the masks and if any hint of a certain medication will help. That will fly off the shelves too.
Just like the time SARS happened. The medical staff were overworked, the staff selling the masks and medicine were abused just because the prices soared due to low stock. The highest rate of mortality was from Wuhan, China. Comments have been flying around about how irresponsible they are by travelling all over the world and bringing in the virus to other countries.
Considering that those who have been discovered contracting the virus have been the elderly, the comments have been nasty, to say the least. However, I can’t say that they are all irresponsible. They were just trying to use what is left of their lives in travelling.
The worst part of this spread wasn’t the travelling. It was the spread of fear-mongering rumours like eating bats caused the virus, two ways of wearing the surgical masks (utter nonsense), etc. This causes additional work to the authorities already busy with trying to contain the virus and finding ways to cure this with either vaccine or medicine.
The authorities have to work on finding the rumour sources, squash those rumours with facts and educating the public. If you don’t have the cure for the virus, please don’t spread groundless information that don’t help anyone. Those misinformation just add on the workload and delay the authorities from spending meaningful time in finding a cure and vaccine.