COMMENT: Police must do all they can to find nasty racist

Today we report how panic buyers are stripping the shelves in supermarkets, loading up their trolleys with hand sanitisers, toilet rolls, tinned vegetables, pasta and paracetamol.

The stockpiling has got so bad that stores are having to limit how much each person can buy.

But do these people not realise the irony in how they are apparently quite willing to brave crowds of other panic shoppers to get their bulk buys?

Plus, if they are snapping up all the hand sanitiser, there'll be none left for the rest of us - leaving them at risk if they come into contact with others.

Maybe they are planning to set up some kind of nuclear-style bunker in their homes and not come out until the coronavirus outbreak is over.

Much more alarming is the way in which Covid-19 dominating the news agenda has led to an Asian business owner being targeted by hate mail - presumably because it began in China.

Phil Tu, who has owned the Lucky Star Chinese takeaway in Denmead for 35 years, received an anonymous letter purporting to be from local residents and full of expletives and abuse about Chinese nationals. It even called Mr Tu ‘the reason there is coronavirus in the UK’.

Mr Tu, who is actually from Vietnam and has been in the UK since he was 15, said he was stunned and scared. No wonder.

The letter also refers to staff in the Grandeur Beauty Salon next door, saying they should 'go back to China too.'

Sadly they are not the first businesses to fall victim to this kind of disgusting racism following the coronavirus outbreak and we urge Hampshire police to do all they can to trace the person responsible and bring them to justice.