Earlier today, Ozzy Osbourne‘s 34-year-old son posted a photo of him in a supermarket holding two six-packs of Cottonelle toilet paper, and included the following message: “#psa this is a joke. You can’t eat toilet paper. TP can’t stop you from getting corona. Buying it in bulk makes you look like an asshole. Wait is that why you’re buying it, because you’re an asshole? There are far more important house hold products that you need right now. Chronic shitting isn’t a symptom of corona.”

As a reaction to the novel coronavirus, people’s desire to keep a steady supply of household essentials has caused shortages and price gouging at both online and brick-and-mortar stores.

Paul Marsden, a consumer psychologist at the University of the Arts London, told CNBC that our brains push us to panic buy as a way of managing our emotional state.

“It’s about ‘taking back control’ in a world where you feel out of control,” he said. “More generally, panic buying can be understood as playing to our three fundamental psychology needs,” those being autonomy, or a need for control, relatedness, which Marsden defined as “we shopping” rather than “me shopping,” and competence, which is achieved when making a purchase gives people a sense that they are “smart shoppers.”

Toilet paper shortages have been reported in stores in different parts of the world, such as Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Canada, and the U.S.

COVID-19 is the infectious disease caused by the most recently discovered coronavirus.

This new virus and disease were unknown before the outbreak began in Wuhan, China in December 2019.

The virus has infected more than 135,000 people — including at least 1,500 in the U.S.