Tea, beer, garlic: how world copes with lockdown

The winner for most bizarre shortage of 2020 is Afghanistan, where a rumour about a mustachioed newborn advising the purchase of black tea sent people flocking to the shops.

"I will live for two hours and have come to tell you that black tea is the cure to this virus," reads the quote accompanying a picture of the baby, purportedly from the eastern province of Nangarhar, widely shared on Facebook.

The run on the ubiquitous black tea briefly tripled prices before the rush calmed.

Far and away the  most popular coping mechanism, however, has been baking.

Supermarkets across France, Spain, Greece and other parts of Europe have reported shortages in flour, chocolate and yeast as cooped-up citizens try their hand at elaborate cakes.

France's entrepreneurial home bakers skip the overwhelmed grocery stores and buy the raw ingredients directly from their local bakeshop to use at home.

Ramadan feast and immunity

While in Tunisia, citizens hunted down garlic –- despite  World Health Organization warnings that these home remedies do nothing against the novel coronavirus.

In Iraq, staying at home means long afternoons watching television or chatting with relatives -– and that requires salted sunflower seeds.

Supermarkets are running out of the popular snack faster than ever as parents and students wile away hours they would have normally spent at work or school.

In Mexico, beer -- along with tequila -- is a drink of choice.

When the country went into its lockdown, the two national beer giants Heineken and Grupo Modelo –- which makes the country's beloved and now unfortunately-named Corona brand –- announced they would stop producing.

That prompted a wave of panic purchases and a defiant Twitter campaign: #ConLaCervezaNo, or "Don't mess with the beer."

Sri Lanka tried to keep its population from engaging in such vices: it has enforced a total ban on alcohol and cigarettes since its lockdown began on March 20, leading to an explosion in home brewing, an excise official said.

The do-it-yourself distilling has caused a run on sugar, a key ingredient in producing the local moonshine known as kasippu.

There had even been suspected "staged" robberies of liquor stores as shop owners tried to sell the precious commodity under the radar.

For Libyans in the war-ravaged capital Tripoli, homeschooling has been particularly tough.

"We've run out of printer paper, so I've fished out all of my husband's unused old office agendas for them to write down lessons and solve math exercises," said Nadia al-Abed, a stay-at-home mother with three young children whose school has been shuttered.

"I've been begging them to write as small as they possibly can, bribing them with candy," she added.

Schools, airports and non-essential businesses around the world have been shut down for weeks as countries try to curb the novel coronavirus' lightning-fast spread.

In Argentina, it's eggs: 30 of them once cost just 160 pesos, or $2.35, but now run at 240 pesos or $3.52.