The problem with much of the funny is that it can easily appear to be insensitive to the carnage happening about the place no matter the actual intention.
Undoubtedly you are right about the chance of something seeming insensitive in this climate, but I am specifically wondering about the lack of articles pointing out how slack all of our billionaires are being amongst all of this.
After all everyone is having a go at the football players and surely even the biggest 'snowflake' wouldn't object to someone roasting a billionaire.
Yeah, I would guess this is a logistics issue as much as anything else. Our total worldwide mask production probably has enough slack to deal with one or maybe two big countries having huge surges in mask demand, but I'd guess we probably can't deal with the entire developed world having a huge surge in mask demand all at once.
We're seeing a different issue with logistics and paper products. People aren't actually using more toilet paper and napkins per day than they were a month ago. But, a lot of that consumption has moved from offices, workplaces, and restaurants, to home usage.
I didn't actually put much thought into my original post as it was just meant to be a tongue in cheek dig at the way people 'complained' when people offered to help pay for the repair of the Notre-Dame.
I didn't really expect the rich people to buy masks, but I hadn't considered the points above as the reason why. I was reading an article about the flour 'shortage' the other day and it cause is similar to what you describe above. That is, there isn't a shortage of flour and the UK has more than enough to go around (we produce 90,000 tonnes/week). The problem is that the vast majority of the flour produced normally goes for commercial use and normally only 3000 tonnes get used domestically (one bag of flour for every household every 14 weeks).
What this has led to is an industry geared to commercial production and it is a slow (impossible) task to switch the factories to domestic packaging (16kg bags versus 1.5kg bags)
I wasn't talking about the last month or so, I'm talking about the nickel and diming of healthcare system the world over since the 90s/00s, which has seen numbers of beds, nurse staffing, and stocks of equipment getting sliced down year by year as politicians have become more and more used to treating them as businesses, and the general populace has unfortunately all too often bought into that.
I get where you are coming from Sir_Godspeed.
I have family members and friends that work on the 'frontline' in the NHS and I worry about their chances of getting out of this alive, so I find the whole clapping for the carers thing that has been going on very commendable. Can you imagine asking the same people to clap just four months ago though!
Four hours or more of waiting time in A&E. People dying/being treated in corridors...