The day begins as it always does now: in the hunt for toilet paper. Panic buying has permanently ruptured supplies of hygiene essentials. Rumour flies around this city like water droplets on air conditioners in July. A local paper carries an unsubstantiated report that supplies from the mainland have been stopped at the border and, as if in a Paul Daniels Saturday evening show, pooouft! there is nothing left on the shelves. We do not like it, not a little, not a lot.

Initially the prosperous residents of this expensive expatriate enclave laughed it off but the rumour grew legs and sprinted away out of control, as employers were forced to reprioritise their domestic helpers to spend hours in optimistic queues at already-emptied shelves in the remote hope of snapping up any available personal hygiene-related paper goods the second that stocks were replenished. Lately, that hope has been in vain. The magnitude of the impending inconvenience has begun to hit home, especially since online supermarkets now refuse to deliver “through the tunnel” that connects this small resort-type village with reality.

There’s talk of ordering loo rolls from Amazon, despite the inflated shipping charge, despite the suspicion that unscrupulous “delivery people” with their little vans extort danger money for delivering to your door. A news report yesterday of an armed raid on a toilet roll delivery van has pushed the panic to ever more extreme levels. There is now little hope of securing further supplies. Once upon a time, you could order a Japanese-style posterior-washing lavatory in the morning and have it delivered, installed and working well by lunchtime. That time has passed.

The Covid-19 virus has all but silenced this formerly bustling village. Tumbleweed would roam its deserted streets if there were such a thing here. Dogs, once muzzled for their own protection against the screaming post-school Hell’s Angels mobs of wild 7 year olds rampaging uncontrolled on their scooters are now unafraid to be walked on just a short leash. All schools have now barricaded their doors until at least the middle of March and it is the turn of the children to be corralled for their own safety by their iPads, first by their teachers in remote classrooms and then by video games, closeted from the reach of the dreaded virus. A brave Antipodean runs the gauntlet of parental condemnation by holding team sports sesssions for primary school children on the beach every Tuesday mornings, attended solely by little boys letting off steam in half a dozen languages. There is no sign of the little girls, who are probably at home learning Chopin or needlepoint. Others have been sent away to their home countries by anxious parents hoping to keep ahead of the global spread of this insidious virus that we don’t really understand.

Household cleaning products are also absent from supermarket shelves as householders bulk buy them in attempts to rid themselves of this scourge. Reports have even reached your correspondent of a domestic helper forced by her employers to remove her clothes before she enters the household and to bathe herself in disinfectant, such is the paranoia surrounding this unknown disease.

“I mean, you just don’t know where anything has been, sweetie,” intoned our interviewee, a neat and fragrant self-styled trailing spouse of indeterminate age who otherwise wished to remain anonymous. “You don’t know who’s touched that lift button or opened the door just before you. I find myself pushing doors open with my sharp elbows but I don’t always have a gym towel at hand to pull open a door if I’m at the shops. They’ve all started leaving their doors open now but goodness knows what people will do when the humid weather comes back. Aircondition the street, probably. Goodness knows how much ruddy bleach they’ve tipped into the sea. I mean it might clean it up a bit and the fish are dead already, but still, you have to wonder.

‘ And as for masks: I’m a big fan of people not sneezing their germs all over me, and I like it that they wear a mask here to keep their colds in, but you can’t get a mask anywhere now – I think I ordered the very last ones from that shop in Sweden – and if you don’t wear one people look at you as if you’ve got the plague or something. Mind you I know people who say it’s all a big load of tut, this panic. They’d quite happily walk around in their offices or sit on buses that have  signs up saying we all have to wear a mask but they think it doesn’t apply to them. I bet they would have been the same ones screaming ‘Project Fear’ these past few years.

‘Social life? Well, I don’t go out much anyway, only to the gym and shops. All the public spaces are closed and now my singing’s been cancelled for the whole term. My husband joked that he’d have to send me home, but if I went back to London they’d be saying that there too! You’ve got to laugh, haven’t you?

‘What about all that working from home malarkey as well? We’re lucky enough to  have a study at home, but when people are cooped up with their kids in their small highrise apartments, they need to get out. The restaurants might be full at lunchtime but now it’s all men who spend their whole day hunched over their laptops drinking espresso and making angry phone calls. They’ll only eat a sandwich, surely? It must feel so unwelcoming to the groups of mums who want to sit and drink wine all afternoon. I bet they’re not making anywhere near as much money as they did before all this started.”

Flights have been curtailed and the list of countries imposing restrictions undifferentiated between Hong Kong and the Mainland grows daily. It’s an anxious time for people with existing travel arrangements. One look at the giant marooned cruise ships forlornly at anchor in the harbour, having been refused docking at the cruise terminal is yet another reminder of our fragile knowledge of the trajectory of this epidemic.

The local shops that have abruptly stopped trading are yet another reminder of how susceptible this economy is to international upsets. It’s not just the laid-off Cathay pilots who’ve faced this sudden wake-up alarm to their fragility of their existence and stopped spending. Little by little this global economy is starting to feel the effects of its international community gradually seeping away. After almost a year of disturbance and uncertainty who knows how much more strain this economy can withstand?