At present, the period of self-isolation that the government is recommending spans 14 days. And now there is a website which will tell you, with mathematical certainty, whether your stash of toilet paper will get you through quarantine.
Visit How Much Toilet Paper? to do the math yourself: simply input the number of rolls you have, and the number of times you visit the bathroom each day, and it will provide you with the number of days your stocks can be expected to last.
If you want to get even deeper into the nitty-gritty of the equations, you can click ‘Advanced Options’ and insert values such as the number of sheets you use per wipe, your number of wipes per visit, the number of people in your household, and the number of days remaining in your quarantine. (This last one will be particularly useful in shared houses, where one person’s self-isolation might have started after the other’s.)
The site was created by Ben Sassoon and Sam Harris from the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom; it started as a bit of a joke, but it soon became clear that this was a genuinely valuable resource. Now they just hope that giving people the hard numbers will stop them panic-buying and hoarding more toilet paper than necessary.
“Our average user has 500% more toilet paper than they would need in a potential quarantine,” Sassoon told The Verge. “We are hoping that people will use the site and see they don’t need to go out and empty the shelves.”
This article originally appeared on Men’s Health
