The point of panic is not only do you not understanding it, the ones panicking don’t either.
You can have a ton of the stuff two ridges over, but that doesn’t mean that this will stop people from acting irrationally where they can’t see the things, and the panic spreads.
Saying “don’t panic” “I’m not panicking” often doesn’t work.
You’re right about that.
In California, we see a lot of cultural-based hoarding in Asian-intensive areas. The couple in the below video look well-to-do and they’re not in a large urban area. But they saw a lot of people getting water which triggered them into overbuying water which triggers other people, which triggers other people. It’s more a display of ‘face’ than necessity. We saw this triggered hoarding behavior earlier with masks, too - shopping carts full of nothing but masks (certainly more than they’d need in a lifetime and too expensive to send to China at $70 a pop postage). And now there are no masks to be found. Then notice white girl - 2 small packs of TP, displaying a completely different kind of ‘face’:
https://sacramento.cbslocal.com/2020/02/28/solano-county-residents-bracing-for-local-outbreak/