California Governor Gavin Newsom has gone just this side of declaring martial law due to a .000008 risk of death from COVID-19. His promotion of panic has led to depletion of essential goods nationwide. With 40,000,000 people and the fifth largest economy in the the world (if it were its own country), California can vacuum up the nation's short-term stores easily. And has. Forget survey results about equality, social justice, and kindness, in reality America's most progressive state is just as greedy and selfish as anyone when it comes to personal behavior.

Because of concerns about spreading coronavirus, tens of millions of people are working from home that didn't before. 

How many people on a survey would respond positively that they'd hoard goods at the expense of others?

Very few. On surveys, 78 percent of Americans disagree with even 'no victim' greed like being paid more than someone else to do the same job and yet if there is one thing that California's reaction to 335 cases of COVID-19 in a state of 40,000,000 has shown, it is that at the first sign of trouble it's all about greed. And it makes no difference if you are a CEO or an employee, a Democrat or, in California, even more of a Democrat. Nearly everyone is doing it.

If there is reason for hope that coronavirus fears may mean pro-science beliefs get back to being the norm in modern culture, it is that regular chemicals have disappeared from store shelves in San Francisco while they clamor for vaccines they used to distrust. Meanwhile, there are plenty of organic alternatives and vegan food to be found.

If there is reason for despair it's that 64 percent of British millennials believe the moon landing was fake. Distrust of reality is so endemic that 11 percent of millennials in the country think Tupac Shakur faked his own death and is living in hiding somewhere.

Smoking is in decline to such an extent that there is no longer fear about creating Prohibition-style casual criminals with totalitarian rules or outright bans, so the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is doing the next best thing; mandating graphic warnings on packages.

With coronavirus all over media and politicians looking for ways to leverage concern into votes for their political party this November, a number of parents will want to take their children to a doctor at the first sign of a cough "just to be sure" and doctors say that's a bad idea. It burdens a health system that could be overtaxed if aggressive projections about the impact of COVID-19 come true.

Those parents are not being rational, doctors will note, most kids will not be harmed by it any more than they would a bad cold or flu, and yet the American medical system is overrun by "defensive medicine" that engages in the same behavior.