No panic, but hoarding

Consumers continue to sweep up stocks of gloves, hand sanitizer and other items that can prevent or limit exposure to the coronavirus, whenever it reaches TT.

In Port of Spain on Wednesday, Quik Pharm pharmacist Alana Bosland said several cases of N95 masks sold out during the course of the week. There are approximately 300 masks to a case. She said people were buying entire boxes of 10 or 25 masks, and she was now restricting the number of masks people could buy.

This was especially needed as suppliers’ stocks are low and they are limiting the amount that pharmacies could buy for resale. She said medical professionals from private doctors’ offices have also come in to buy masks. Bosland said people were also buying cold medicines and vitamins and stocks in some common ones such as Vitamin C chewables were also running short.

Bosland said frontline staff in the pharmacy are themselves wearing masks to deal with the public, and everyone, including pharmacists, were wearing masks when a cruise ship was in port on Monday.

She said people are scared, although this fear has lessened following the Carnival season, when people felt they were more at risk due to the increased number of visitors to the island.

Pharmacist Natalie Cooks, of PennyMed Pharmacy, said she also saw an increase in the number of masks being bought, as well as hand sanitizer, gloves, Vitamin C and other medicines meant to boost resistance. She said however that she was not seeing a lot of people actually wearing masks, and speculated that those purchasing the face masks were stockpiling them in the eventuality that the virus did reach TT. Pennywise supervisor Lisa Baptiste said the Charlotte Street branch of the popular store was out of both dust masks and the N95 masks, which she said is selling out as soon as fresh supplies reach the store. She said at that branch alone, they were selling five masks at a time, have gone through 60 boxes of the regular dust masks in a week and had sold ten boxes of N95 masks in a day.

Baptiste said people were waiting in the aisles of the store while workers were unpacking hand sanitizer and wet wipes, and were literally taking them out of the boxes before they could even be placed on the shelves.

Bosland said while the Health Minister, medical professionals and pharmacists are consistently telling the public they did not need to panic buy items such as masks, people are scared and so they continue to stockpile these items.
See Page 6A