Having gone through that on the supply side it was a manufactured crisis. When news organizations were still waiting for the first COVID19 cases to happen in th

Having gone through that on the supply side it was a manufactured crisis. When news organizations were still waiting for the first COVID19 cases to happen in their country they would run fluff stories from other places. A very common one was the toilet paper shortage. They probably got some intern to write it sloppily so in some it wasn't even clear that the photos and examples were from a different country. That drove people to rush to stores and hoard creating a self-fulfilling phrophecy as no grocery store will keep too many days of stock of toilet paper as it has too much volume. That this then happened in more places made it even more of a story and it sort of snowballed. The fact that people were now at home and using different types of paper than what offices use was as far as I can tell a very small factor, it was mostly panic hoarding.