I’ve been to countless Black Friday events, and they don’t hold a candle to what I witnessed and experienced during a shopping trip to Costco last weekend. Shelves were emptied. Customers swarmed the bottled water and toilet paper aisles, picking them clean almost instantly. At one point, I couldn’t move my cart in any direction at all as a stampede of people pushed my wife and me forward toward the checkout lines.

I knew everyone around me was panicking because of the coronavirus, but my young family of six isn’t dreading the disease at all. We just want to get it over with.