While some families are going to Walmart or Sam’s Club to stock up to prevent having to make much contact with individuals, others are taking more drastic measures, even going so far as to wait in line for guns and knives.

I can’t fathom why a typical family would need a 12 year supply of toilet paper unless they know something nobody else does. 

I’m not trying to shame people that are stocking up for a worst-case scenario: in fact, I applaud people that are thinking ahead in case of shortages of food, but we might be going too far trying to get guns.

Of course, it’s not entirely the people’s fault: a lot of things factor into their thought process, including their fear, others fear (because it’s hard to disagree that fear at a time like this is going to be infectious), and (most importantly) fake news.

Fake news leads people astray all the time, and just because the person saying it might know it’s fake, others might not, leading to someone getting hurt. While some news is less believable than others, people will still do whatever they believe, even if it means taking drugs to cure a disease that scientists are still trying to make a vaccine for.

So it’s really not the people that are to blame for the empty aisles in store, as much it is the people that make up news stories for the fun of it.

In the end though, while the news is scaring a lot of people, the panic is quite excessive considering we’ve had to deal with widespread diseases before and we’re not extinct yet.