Now, photos could show where some of the food has actually gone.

People have been sharing their stockpiles at home, with rows and rows of cleaning products and pre-prepped meals.

Cupboards are crammed to the brim with everything people could need to get them through two weeks of isolation – and a few months more besides.

An Australian chef posted on Reddit: ‘Fully prepared for the coronas (90 plus meals).

‘I mainly just prepared so I don’t have to cook after work.

‘I am a chef, so erratic hours, not too keen on cooking after big days. Also if I do get quarantined I am set for the duration.’

He said he had removed a stack of the food for the photo to demonstrate there were two layers.

Some were impressed by the preparations, saying: ‘I have freezer envy. That is a beautiful sight.’

But another said: ‘I find this amount of meals way unnecessary, especially for coronavirus.

‘Besides, I am from northern Italy, and this kind of hoarding is exactly the reason why I went to the supermarket yesterday only to find the vegetable section completely empty.

‘I know you probably have bigger supermarkets in the US, but still…can you guarantee that nothing will go to waste?’

Meanwhile, others boasted about the hoards of food and cleaning supplies on Facebook.

One woman said she had pureed enough tomatoes to last for a year, according to MailOnline.

‘The tomatoes were just skinned in hot water, pureed in a food processor, and then cooked down for a while to remove the air from pureeing them,’ she wrote.

‘Then, they were put in jars and processed using the Fowlers Vacola method to vacuum seal them. I’ll use them for sauce and casserole bases during the year now.’

Another said she had been stockpiling long before coronavirus appeared, saying she had been buying discounted items in bulk for around five years after a period when she ‘couldn’t afford to feed the family’.

She added: ‘I wouldn’t stockpile perishables unless you are positive you will use them.’

Tesco’s chairman has insisted that people do not need to panic buy as the supermarket will be able to keep stocks up.

John Allan, was reacting after images on social media showed empty shelves across the UK supermarket sector.

He said that the panic buying has not threatened their supply chain and they were confident they could overcome the short-term shortages.

He said: ‘There’s plenty of product in the supply chain, there’s plenty of food at Tesco and other supermarkets, and I don’t think anybody needs to panic buy. We, and I’m sure our competitors, are re-filling our supply chains as rapidly as ever we can.’

Allan said it was unlikely Tesco, which has a 27.2 per cent UK grocery market share, would experience anything more than ‘very short term, temporary’ shortages of certain products.