It would appear, given the fact that there had already been reports of cases of the Coronavirus elsewhere in the Caribbean, that Guyanese, as we are inclined to do in these situations, had pre-empted the arrival of the malady here. One makes this point to draw attention to the fact that having, it seems, arrived at an understanding that issues of environmental safety and an upgraded sensitivity to creating, as far as possible, a sanitary environment, can help keep the dreaded malady at bay, locals had set a high premium on stocking up on sanitizers and disinfectants.
There transpired, it seems, a corresponding response from some local consumer goods outlets that targeted products with bleach and disinfectant properties for a ‘jacking up’ of prices and a removal of some goods from shelves, ruses usually associated with attempts to mimic shortages of these goods. The whole idea, of course, based on this country’s historic experience of hoarding and price-gouging, is for the distributors of those products to ‘make a killing,’ never mind the fact that all of this would amount to consumers being denied access to products that might help them stave off serious illness, or worse. Circumstances like those, of course, can give rise to a kind of national nervousness that can gather momentum quickly.
It seems from some information which is both limited and was hastily gathered, but which, we are persuaded, is reliable, that some disinfectant and sanitizing products are being subjected to both hoarding and price-gouging. As of early yesterday morning the mix of the information that we had gathered first hand and the cacophony of public chatter had persuaded us that some consumer goods outlets had begun to hoard and to ‘jack up’ prices of disinfecting and sanitizing products.
There can now be no denying the fact that the Coronavirus is a deadly menace and that it is for the state and non-state agencies responsible for the provision of health services to intervene immediately. They must, among other things, use such legitimate measures as are at their disposal to publicly register their strongest disapproval of practices that can be construed as being either hoarding or price-gouging, bearing in mind the likely public health repercussions as well as the implications for the national mood. Here, it is not necessarily a matter of pointing fingers though, frankly, there may already be more than enough evidence of the aforementioned practices to warrant assertive official responses that allow whoever the transgressors are to get the message sent with generous measures of both clarity and seriousness.
