Opinion | The Coronavirus Hits Hong Kong? Quick, Toilet Paper!

Mrs. Lam has now tightened access through most border points — with an unanticipated ripple effect: Rumors started circulating online that goods from the mainland would be delayed, maybe even cut off. When Mrs. Lam announced more restrictions on entry into the city, the people of Hong Kong didn’t sigh with relief: We ran to supermarkets and panic-bought three-ply toilet tissue.

“We Hong Kongers have to take care of ourselves, because we can’t trust the government to do it,” my 30-something friend Frankie, a social worker, said to me the other day. Public trust in the city’s government, institutions and police is at a historic low. The determination and grit displayed by Hong Kongers during a long season of pro-democracy protests last year is now channeled into fighting the coronavirus epidemic at the street level, day after day.

A few months ago, Hong Kongers stood in lines of thousands to vote in local elections and, before that, in parades of hundreds of thousands to demand universal suffrage. Now we all wear surgical masks, cough into our elbows and wash our hands (Back and front! Get those finger webs! At least 20 seconds!) 10 times a day. These are sensible, rational actions, and they arguably are protecting us all. As of Saturday, Hong Kong, a city of 7.5 million, had 26 confirmed cases of coronavirus and one death — fewer than Singapore, some 1,600 miles away from China.

But rational actions can only go so far in the face of the unknown, and panic has an infection rate far higher than any coronavirus.

The empty products shelves of our village Wellcome brought back memories of other times, and other places, when I’ve found myself in the middle of stress-hoarding. On days before hurricanes in New York, certain items predictably vanish from stock: bottled water, white bread, peanut butter. I’m old enough to remember the special shelf that my parents kept in the back of our New Jersey basement during the J.F.K. years, lined with cans of tomatoes, beans and tuna fish, our first line of defense in the event of nuclear attack.

And now, as I stand in a toilet paper–less Wellcome, panic strikes again. If toilet paper has disappeared, what else is gone? By instinct, I head for the bread aisle: all there, phew. Peanut butter, check. Water, ditto. Why hasn’t anyone loaded up on those? Then I remember that only about 100 Westerners live on my island of 5,000. Different culture, different scarcity anxieties. Memories of plagues, wartime occupation, SARS and bird flu are etched in Hong Kong’s DNA.

Sure enough, the rice shelves are bare, save for a bag of pricey, imported, short-grain organic brown rice. The instant-noodle aisle is depleted, and the vegetable section is down to a few lonely scraps of bok choy.