Officials are saying it’s not time to start stockpiling your groceries

There’s that one scene in every disaster movie where the president gets on national TV and encourages people not to panic. What follows is a montage of … well, literal panic: families loading up their cars and heading for the hills, riots in the streets and people clearing out grocery stores of every last item.

Now that concerns over COVID-19, otherwise known as coronavirus, have caused the stock market to plunge, travel restrictions in other countries and a slew of GOP lawmakers to self-quarantine, Americans are rushing to the supermarket.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Robert Redfield in late February told a congressional hearing there is no need to stock up on food and supplies. But that was more than two weeks ago, and more cases of potential coronavirus have popped up across the United States—including here in Louisiana.

Since then, store shelves at places like Costco and Walmart have been nearly cleared out of bottled water, toilet paper, antibacterial hand gel and other household items.

But is the early panic really necessary? As Eater puts it in a recent article, “A storm could reasonably interrupt supply chains, but COVID-19 doesn’t threaten the U.S. supply chain for food, which is mostly intracontinental. Instead, overeager shopping—borne of a fear that customers will be stuck at home for prolonged periods of time during an enforced quarantine and that supplies will run out—is a problem in and of itself.”

“Panic buying becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy,” Cornell Tech professor Karan Girotra told Eater. “A lot of people think [the store] will run out, and then they do run out … Irrational behavior, rumors, misinformation can create short-term logistical issues.”

An added problem with panic buying is that it’s fueled mostly by perfectly healthy Americans buying up items that people on the frontlines might need more, such as health care workers, delivery employees and others who more frequently interact with the public.

Read on for the full story from Eater. And hey! WASH YOUR HANDS!