Prepping for a disaster is a luxury that many of us can't afford

As we see in some parts of America, people who want to hunker down for years are not attempting to change the future: it is often part of a retreat from active citizenship, writes Michael Mills

The precautions needed to tackle coronavirus have got many of us thinking about how prepared we are for a crisis (Getty)

As revealed by the Great Toilet Paper Panic of 2020, the spread of Covid-19 has been a surprise to many people around the world. Yet, amidst the global uncertainty caused by coronavirus, one group has remained eerily calm.

Particularly, America’s subculture of “Doomsday Preppers” – a group I’ve interviewed and studied throughout the last half-decade – have spent years preparing for such a pandemic.

One of them explained to me in 2014 that the possible spread of “a new swine flu, bird flu, a fill in the blank kind of flu” was a good reason to store several months’ worth of a food and toilet paper at home.