Mass panic in Poland that sent people storming into supermarkets to strip the shelves clear has resulted in a lot of the food purchased ending up in the bin.

These shocking pictures were posted online at a housing estate in the city of Suwalki in north-eastern Poland showing bins full of unopened food which was purchased in panic and is now past its sell by date.

Footage distributed by Reuters on 12th March showed supermarket shelves in Poland completely stripped bare with nothing left after the panic buying.

Things like macaroni, rice and canned tomatoes where the first to sell out, but eventually all the basic foodstuffs were no longer available as people grabbed anything they could to survive quarantine.

Polish newspaper Fakt said the pictures were the “inevitable consequence of people not thinking about what they were buying” – pointing out that grabbing excess supplies of fresh bread and other things with a short shelf life was a pointless exercise.

They said that the pictures were the inevitable result of panic buying with piles of food including fresh bread simply thrown in the bin.

The pictures were posted on the Facebook account ‘Miasto Suwalki’.

Online commentators were outraged at the wastage, with some noting that they had spotted people buying so much bread that they could barely carry it back home, only for it to end up in the bin a week later.

Others suggested that when people realised it was not going to be needed, they could have handed it to needy families of which there were many in the city that would have taken it.

Poland has 927 confirmed cases of infection from the coronavirus with 12 deaths according to the latest data from the Johns Hopkins University.

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