Welcome to the inquiry on the BBC World Service with me Sandra Canthal.

Each week one question, four expert witnesses and an answer. Early in March in March in a supermarket in Sydney, Australia, a woman went to do her shopping. On her list of things to buy was toilet paper. In a

video which went viral you can hear what happened as she walked through the

supermarket aisles. She's set upon by two other shoppers who are violently trying to grab that pack of toilet paper out of her hands.

When the screaming stops, the two shoppers have seized the toilet paper and put it in their shopping trolley, which is already filled

with jumbo packs of toilet roll.

Please!

I just want one pack. In the end, the store manager had to separate them all and call the police.

Scenes like this are happening all over the world as people trade, beg, borrow and even

steel what have become valuable vanishing commodities like dried pasta, flour, cleaning products, and of course toilet paper.

There are now billions of us around the world living in a lockdown scenario confined to our homes for, well, we don't

know how long.

So this week, how are we reacting to life in the time of Corona?

And how do you help people stay rational in a pandemic?

Part 1, Zoom in, Zoom out.

Life in the time.

Life in the time of Corona is a reference to the 1985 novel Love in the Time of Cholera

by the Nobel Prize winning Colombian author Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

It's become something of a refrain on social media, which highlights the extraordinary differences

between life during past epidemics and the way we live today.

We may be ordered to shelter inside our individual walls,

but in 2020 we are alone in this together.

...