Aside from prescription medicines, of all the household products that most people would fear running short of it is surely lavatory paper that tops the list. And the panic-buying of is not as irrational as it might appear.

In short, we don’t make much of it. This country is one of Europe’s biggest importers of lavatory paper and disposable nappies (which use pulp paper). Around 85 per cent – or 1.1 million out of 1.3 million tonnes – of all the toilet tissue used in the UK annually is imported, according to The Confederation of Paper Industries.

The real question, as the urge to prep for the coming coronavirus outbreak takes hold, is how likely is the UK to run out? Australia, which is highly reliant on Chinese supply chains that have been crunched by draconian factory closures, has already seen panic-buying to the point where the government has introduced controls. Shopkeepers have had to call the police in to break up fights over the last few rolls available, such are the indignities of rushing to preserve one’s dignity in a crisis.

For now, no-one expects European countries to face that kind of crunch since the levels of factory closures possible in Xi Jinping’s China are much less acceptable over here. The odds are still that the paper mills of Scandinavia will keep on turning, and the UK will still be adequately catered for – so long as nobody panics.