Panic buying and certain items in short supply in Hong Kong once again :(

Not many people on board the North Point-Hung Hom 

ferry these days, it looks like!

 

I've spent a good part of the last two days out shopping for necessities.  Over the weekend, I ran out of rice but decided to wait to get some on a weekday.  Fortunately, despite scary photographs appearing on social media of supermarket shelves stripped bare, I managed to do so with surprising ease at the very first supermarket I went to yesterday afternoon.  

 

Still, that trip to the supermarket wasn't as stress-free as is usually the case for me.  For one thing, there was a far longer queue at the checkout than I commonly encounter.  Which made for far less social distancing than I would like at a time when Hong Kong has officially gone past the 30,000 mark with regards to reported new daily cases (a record 34,466 yesterday and 32,597 today). 

 

Also, I did notice that some panic buying had taken place as the chilled meat section of the store was pretty denuded of stock.  (I'm guessing that the recent closing of the abbatoirs at Sheung Shui and Tsuen Wan as a result of dozens of Covid infections having been detected in the slaughterhouses forced lots of people who usually get their meat at the wet markets into the supermarkets to get imported meat instead.)  

 

It seems that a lot of people were less successful than me yesterday with regards to their grocery shopping expeditions.  Because this morning saw people waiting outside supermarkets ahead of their opening, presumably to get what they were unable to get the day before or had newly run out of!   

Another shock with regards to the supermarkets came by way of my discovering that a number of them, including 240 branches of ParknShop (one of Hong Kong's two major supermarket chains), had shortened their opening hours beginning today.  Walking by a Wellcome Superstore that usually stays open until midnight, I found that, starting today (until who knows when), it will close at 5pm instead!

 

The government says there's no need for people to panic (buy) and stockpile goods.  But when people know that a lockdown is imminent, but don't know when and for how long it will be for, of course they are going to panic -- or, at the very least, decide that they need to plan ahead by doing such as stocking up!  And, okay, yes, all this panic buying/stocking up may be creating artificial shortages of items.  But, on an individual level, one feels obliged to get certain things before they do disappear from the shelves for who knows how long!  

Hong Kongers remember all too well the mask, hand sanitizer and other shortages which occured in early 2020 (and for the record, the items that ended up being ever so hard to procure back then included rice).  In fact, so scarred have I been by the great toilet paper shortage of February 2020 that I no longer allow myself to wait until I'm on the last toilet paper roll, like was previously the case, before I go off and buy more of it!

 

So, even while I still have a box worth or so still of masks, I decided to go and get some more today -- and found, to my horror, that KF94 masks (which I switched to from surgical masks at the beginning of 2022) appear to be thinner on the ground now as a result of my being far from the only person who's taken to wearing them during this fifth coronavirus wave that's fuelled by the highly infectious Omicron variant. 

 

For the record: I did manage to find stores selling them -- though they were out of stock at two branches of the store that's been my "go to" for masks for some months now, with a staffer at one of the branches telling me that they won't have KF94 masks in stock again until at least the end of this month!  And for good measure, I ended up buying more rapid antigen test (RAT) kits too for "just in case" (though, right now, they appear to be available in lots of places)!

 

And, then, after I got home, I learnt that painkillers also have disappeared from many shelves!  That's just another headache to have to deal with, including the (temporary -- but for how long?) closing of 53 branches of Hong Kong's largest pharmacy chains along with a number of commercial establishments, including over 400 bank branches!  

 

Will there be a bank note shortage at some point in the not to distant future?  I'm wondering if the fear of that is why there have been long queues outside some banks which have remained open for business.  Another type of establishment that I've seen queues extending outside of it in recent days: private clinics.  

 

At first, I wondered if lots of people who were feeling sick had flocked to see doctors for their (minor) ailments.  But I've read that many people have been flocking to private clinics to be vaccinated in recent days.  Which is a shame -- because they waited until we're in the middle of the worst part of a pandemic that's been going for over two years now to finally do so and, also, because the vaccines being dispensed for the most part by the private clinics is the much less effective Sinovac (rather than BioNTech/Pfizer)!