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Why COVID-19 Is Clogging Your Toilet — and What You Can Do about It
If you feel like your toilet is doing a crappy job during the COVID-19 pandemic, you are not alone. In the past few weeks, lots of other Americans are also fighting with their toilets — as the toilets simply refuse to do their jobs. But your toilet doesn’t have anything against you. You’re just overworking it.
The Big Shift in Defecation. A direct consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic is that during this national period of staying at home, very few people are doing their business at their usual places of business. If you are not eliminating waste at work, then, where else are you going to do so? I mean, shit happens. And this means a greater load on your home toilet, or a bigger load in your home toilet — however you prefer to put it. Of course, no one is conducting door to door surveys on toilet use. But you don’t need a survey to tell you that in the early days of the U.S. COVID-19 crisis, there was a massive run on toilet paper. Throughout the month of March, the toilet paper aisle in my local grocery looked like the Grinch had just been there.
The COVID-19 lockdown also helps explain why grocery stores have had such a hard time keeping up with consumer demand for the home variety of toilet paper. Prior to the COVID lockdown, more than half of all the toilet paper used in the United States was used at…
