Prepping for pandemic...

[wheresmymojo]

I was quite blasé about the novel corona virus outbreak but things I've read today have changed my mind.

I'm not usually a prepper but best things to stock up on for a pandemic?

Surgical face masks?
Latex gloves?
Anti bac wipes and hand wash?

Look, viruses are viruses. They don't know or care about pollution. Fair enough, if your lungs are damaged for any reason you are more likely to develop complications, but viral infection is not dependent on the state of your lungs.
More and more I feel like we are not being told everything. I'm a prepper but not a panicker, but I just don't know... There seems to be so little actual info out there

In a similar vein to @teta's post about the blog I have just finished reading this entry on Reddit which is very interesting...

There's a definite theme of there not being enough test kits to actually diagnose and so the numbers are likely much higher than reported.

Also...morbid but if people are self-isolating and then they die, how long until anyone knows they're dead?

https://www.reddit.com/r/Coronavirus/comments/ew2tjo/localreporttwhyhasstherebeennnonewssfrom/

Just wondering. How do you feel now the WHO has declared a Global Emergency?

OK @YappityYapYap so to match your batshit theory with one of my own:

Many UK cities also have massive pollution problems, to the point where studies have shown that some children growing up in certain areas of London have been shown to have reduced lung function.

So it’s not just those dirty foreign cities that cause a risk to health. Surely By your logic, if the Coronavirus came to some of the UK’s more polluted cities, then the population would be at increased risk?

I've seen that people are saying the figures for today are 305 dead and another 1921 cases confirmed.

Haven't seen a link to the official news release though and the map hasn't been updated so taking with a pinch of salt at the mo.

Is anyone concerned by the videos on YouTube which are coming out of China, showing armed police, apartments being sealed off to lock people inside, high numbers of dead, body bags and such? I know some will be fake but not all, a few are taken in hospitals. While these are themselves very harrowing what is worrying me is that none of this is being reported in the media.

1. Masks don't protect you. Maybe a space helmet might.

2. We won't lose tap water until the very very end of society. Dont bother with more than a fortnights water. If the taps turn off you're scuppered anyway.

I try to take things not in mainstream press with a pinch of salt. Only because you dont know where these imagines are really coming from. Packed hospital corridors in China could be a queue in the tax office, or older pictures, or after a terror attack somewhere I the past.

But lime with the mass new year sexual assaults in Germany that no reported on.... who knows.

Bizzarly it seems most news is agenda based and fake now everyone can spread stuff on socail media.

We have to see as it spreads outside of China. Not all 18 countries could contain or hold back the real story, what ever that is

Apparently the 1921 new confirmed cases and additional 45 dead is just from Hubei province. That's a big jump just for the one province (more than the whole of the country on other days). Other provinces still to report...

Galley

Yes, I've seen them. At first I thought they were fake. I'm starting to suspect some may be genuine.

It wouldn't be reported in the media because there is no media in Wuhan at the moment that isn't controlled by CCP and the mainstream media aren't going to do a story on unverifiable videos posted on YT.

Read the link I posted a few posts back for (allegedly) an account from someone in Wuhan about the lack of reporters there and what he has seen.

Neighbouring province to Hubei has now topped 1,000 cases and is banning people from leaving their homes except for allowing one person out every other day for essentials

The amount of new confirmed cases is scary, the daily death rate is also increasing.

Daily death rates

So my question about prepping for this - which I'm not sure anyone will have an answer to as it's so far beyond anything most of us will have needed to consider previously...

Let's say hypothetically the UK was in this situation - only one person can leave every other day OR there's a pandemic bad enough that everyone bunkers down.

That would mean all self employed people, people on zero hour contracts and such are out of work for that time (unless they can work from home).

Also lots of people rely on overtime to bump up their wages.

I imagine(?) big corporates would still pay their people but what about other companies?

WTF happens?

What happens if lots of people suddenly can't pay their mortgage because they've been on lockdown for two months?

I'm probably (personally) more worried about this

8.9% of the adult population of China have COPD, approximately 100 million people

About 2.5% of the adult population of the UK have COPD, approximately 1.2 million people

China has poorer lung function than the UK by a massive amount as 8.9% of all adults in China have COPD. This doesn't even take into account the people that don't have a chronic case

The biggest issue is smoking and environmental factors the article says

So 8.9% of the adult population with COPD, the immune compromised, the people with moderate respiratory issues and the elderly are at all at risk of having complications from contracting any virus that attacks the respiratory system in China. That's a lot of people that are susceptible. Even if the immune compromised, people with moderate respiratory issues and the elderly only take up 5% of the population, that's still 13.9% of the adult population at risk which is a lot, a lot more than anywhere else in the world. China has 20% of the worlds population living in it but it has 33.3% of the worlds COPD cases

@wheresmymojo Short-term, at least in mortgage terms.. not much. No-one is going to be sending bailiffs around to people who are quarantined, and if things got that bad chances are house prices would drop following the virus due to demand because.. well. Smaller population.

That shouldn't be your concern. Your concern should be a) how they pay for food and b) who exactly drives the food to the store?

I've also just spent some time trawling through videos on Twitter, and even allowing for a large pinch of salt, not knowing the origin of them and knowing a lot may be fake - they are still really concerning. Partly because it's not being reported in the mainstream media but also, hell even if it was I'd still be worried. It's dreadful when people are just falling down dead all over the place and then people coming along in hazmat suits to scoop them up. That's the stuff of nightmares. I feel very very sad for those people in Wuhan and Hubei province right now.

And I've been thinking too about the practical implications if it were to reach here in some shape or form, on that scale. These are good questions to ask, and worth thinking about.
When would the food trucks not come to Tesco? Or even if stuff is still arriving but everything is hampered, slow, short staffed. I queued for three times longer than normal in my post office today because they were short staffed. Things go to shit quite surprisingly quickly when there aren't enough people to do their jobs, and it's always valuable to think about how we as individuals might respond to situations when that's a concern.

I don't think things like homes being repossessed would be the first thing I'd worry about. What would worry me is society ceasing to function very quickly if a significant portion of people get ill, especially if schools are closed so people have to stay at home with their DC. Then suddenly lots of essential services cease to function. Not just the NHS which is a whisker away from being overwhelmed at the best of times. But food shops, the police, electricity boards... Let's hope it doesn't come to that.

WHO situation report for today:
In France, for the first time outside China, a healthcare worker was diagnosed as being ill with 2019-nCoV acute
respiratory disease. The health worker treated two patients who were later identified as probable cases.
The first instance of third-generation human-to-human transmission outside China has been identified, in an
individual who was exposed to a confirmed case from the cluster in Bavaria, Germany.
For the first time, a case was exported from a country other than China: a patient was identified in South Korea
following their exposure in Japan to a confirmed case.
In the last 24 hours, additional instances of human-to-human transmission outside China were reported: in Japan, a
tour guide who is part of the same cluster of Japanese cases who had contact with tourists from Wuhan; in Germany,
a case that is part of the cluster in Bavaria; and in Thailand, a taxi driver who had no travel history to China.

The increase in second generation infections outside China is concerning. Particularly as it will be 2-3 weeks to really understand how many others it has spread to.

I don't know how to quantify it but my concern level is definitely ratcheted up a notch today.

Watching and waiting.

Trying to imagine what it would be like to be shut in for two weeks or a month.

Also wondering how long it would be for the just in time supermarket delivery system to break down. Depends on how many people are too ill to go to work or too scared.

Watching and waiting too, still concerned but there has to be something in the fact that China’s rates are rising so quickly but the rest of the world no where near the same level.

still concerned but there has to be something in the fact that China’s rates are rising so quickly but the rest of the world no where near the same level.
We can't say yet, it only spread outside of China a few days ago. If you looked at the graph for the first weeks in China it was the same. It's worrying that we are now starting to see 2nd and 3rd generation infections outside of China and the infection numbers are starting to increase

Apparently the Philippines has just announced the first death outside China

He was only 44