Getting Tasered, Stealing & Other Crazy Things People Are Doing For Toilet Paper Around The World

The Covid-19 crisis is teaching us many things about personal hygiene. How to wear masks, how we’ve been washing our hands wrong all this while… and just how important toilet paper is to us.

You see it in the panic-buying sprees happening all over the world as the coronavirus spreads. It played out like a Hollywood disaster movie first in Hongkong last month where people were snapping up essentials. Among the items flying off the shelves: surgical masks and hand sanitisers (perfectly understandable), rice and cup noodles (of course), and toilet paper (but why though). Then we experienced it ourselves in Singapore in February, the fateful day when DORSCON Orange was announced. And now, people in Australia, the US and Japan are hoarding so much toilet paper, you’d be forgiven for thinking that they’d just licked food off the floor.

This viral photo shows an apartment in Hongkong stockpiled with enough toilet paper for an entire village.