Prepping for a pandemic 2

[wheresmymojo]

Second thread on prepping for a potential Coronavirus pandemic...following the latest news and information as well as prepping info.

When quoting estimates like mortality rates, replication rates, incubation periods and similar I try to stick to evidence based, scientific studies and will link to sources (unless already linked to them previously).

Generally speaking I use reputable sources of information like well regarded news outlets for other information and will provide links.

Sometimes I may post things outside of this as 'interesting' or such like. I will always caveat these as to be taken with caution.

As much as possible I am attempting not to link to fake news. It's an evolving picture so may not be 100% successful but if something is later shown to be incorrect I will post a correction.

It’s the totally healthy people buying boxes and boxes that piss me off.

I'm not sure where you could even go to buy boxes and boxes. They're in short supply everywhere.

I am in Western Australia and was talking to a pharmacist who had customers trying to buy 100s of masks. I live in mainland China and need one to return home, although not going now. This was last week on Wednesday. She said they were taking names and contacting people once new stock came in, but were trying to prevent bulk purchases.
Prices here are also very high $25 per mask when they come in. Capitalism at its worst!

Thanks for the new thread, mojo 😊

Some silly posts last night.... I don't understand why you would read/ comment on a prepping thread if you aren't interested.

We're all currently full of the cold so I've now depleted my medicine stock. My eldest DC has a chronic auto immune disease, so will be restocking as a priority again today.

We have loads of pasta, tinned food, toilet roll, panettones (still good from Christmas), lots of frozen food (soups, sauces to go with pasta etc), medication. Also have a massive expandable water container of needed. Can anyone else think of anything I might have missed?

Signing in! Thanks for all those keeping an eye on things and updating.

Cleaning products, sanitary products, bathroom supplies, batteries, torch maybe, charge bank and some cash?

You've made a decision then Shanghai? That's bloody tough. I'm sorry. I had pondered the feasibility of getting masks to you so could travel, but realised that was impossible

Kitten, yes back to the the uk for us and HK for for dh.
Yes, tough for dd as China is really the only life has known and she will be worried about her friends and teachers. Have to confess I have not told her yet. We fly to HK on Monday and hopefully out later in the week. Depending on what happens she may never go back as we were due to relocate this summer. dh and I will need to go back at some point to pack up, which as you can imagine in China is not a simple process in normal circumstances, let alone at the moment.

Shanghai I was going to ask what your thoughts were about your own situation...

I bought one box of masks from Amazon when I first started this thread and they haven't materialised so I suspect they ran out of stock but will find out what's happening with them...

Shit Shanghai What a difficult situation.

There's a useful prepping post with links to various CDC prepping guides here:

www.reddit.com/r/China_Flu/wiki/index/preparedness

@wheresmymojo
Luckily we had a holiday booked for Chinese New Year and were able to leave as normal. Prior to leaving it was compulsory to wear a mask in public places and the public holiday was extended. Virtually everywhere was closed. Since we left it everything has become much stricter eg no deliveries to compounds, govt monitoring re health, travel and movements and schools closed. In some cities one person per family is allowed out every two days to buy food. Your identity card is used to control this process. You cannot enter my local supermarket without a temperature check and I am sure they would detain anyone with a high temperature. The measures are strict and it is the only way to stop the spread of the virus- stay at home.
The measures China has taken to control this have been amazing and I am not sure any other country could have managed this.

@ShanghaiDiva yes that’s exactly it. Once it hits a developing country with no big government infrastructure then it’s game over for spread.

No one has any immunity to this, usual flu you have some people having some immunity if it’s a similar strain that went around decades before etc.

The only hope now is to get the vaccine before it’s too bad, but that’s end of the year forecast?

Also all of the worlds PPE is made is China, they stoped exporting so once the container ships arrive, it’s all okay at the moment but say next month we have none arriving.

Also that people buying through reputable companies have had their orders cancelled to keep stock for NHS.

I started telling my family to prep some stuff, they had a good laugh at me. I’m not telling anyone locally as I don’t want to be burgled!

We are an immunocompromised household and wondering at what stage do we cancel the cleaner etc.

Have been wondering about keeping some cash in.

Interesting new paper here (not yet peer reviewed) where they have modelled the expected number of cases for countries outside of China.

Most countries are roughly in line with expectations except for Thailand which is way out. The solid grey line is the number of cases they would expect to see (I assume the other lines are the upper and lower ranges of expectation)

Implies the authors would expect to see double or more of the cases actually reported in Thailand if you extrapolate the solid grey line.

If this was correct it obviously has implications for us given the amount of leisure travel between UK & Thailand

I don't know why the pics I upload look so blurry

They aren't in the original screenshot. Hopefully you can just about make out Thailand on its own over in the far right...

Link to source: www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.02.04.20020495v1

Frankly the whole situation of home schooling dd, trying to get money to ds who is at university when i don’t have my online banking details with me, leaving dh behind, relocating, worrying about how to pay my utility bills in China (don’t want to get cut off and no online payment set up) is blowing my mind.

Latest stats from Kerala...they seem to be on top of things but it leaves me wondering why there are no cases in other areas of India given there is quite a lot of travel between India & China

Person on Twitter didn't link to the source however they are a Senior Health Fellow and had an image of a table split by areas of Kerala and looked legit to me.

Latest #Coronavirus update from Kerala -3rd Feb

Cum. number of passengers from china under observation- 2239

Cum. number of asymptomatic passengers under home isolation- 2155
Cum. no of symptomatic passengers hospitalised- 84

No of symptomatic passengers hospitalised TODAY- 12

Twitter source: twitter.com/oommen/status/1224369954301997056?s=21

Shanghai that sounds very stressful.

Let me know if there is anything I can help with since I'm not working at the moment, even if it's just sourcing material on a certain topic for home schooling or something.

Good news re: vaccine.

A British team are getting close to starting animal testing

news.sky.com/story/coronavirus-significant-breakthrough-in-race-for-vaccine-made-by-uk-scientists-11926469

Thank you for continuing this thread. Personally I just find it comforting to be prepared for any kind of emergency where we'd either have to hunker down at home or grab a bug out bag and run.
I grew up in relative poverty, so it makes sense to me to have plenty of supplies in.
The links are interesting. I dont read them all and I'm not clever enough to understand the science. I just like to know that I'm doing my best to provide for my family.

Regarding the faecal issue Sars spread in faecal matter and was responsible for 320 cases in one apartment complex in HK due to dodgy plumbing. Lots of Chinese apartment blocks are poorly maintained and this may be one reason for the high number of cases in Wuhan. Apart from the lack of hospital spaces for sick patients. Apparently there were only about 100 beds originally available for this sort of thing.
The death rates within Wuhan are over 4% . Death rates in Hubei overall are lower apparently.

I'm sharing this as it is from a genuine news source (Taiwan News) however take with a huge pinch of salt.

Anything could be happening here, including just a simple coding issue, someone behind the scenes wanting to panic people for their own weird reasons, etc.

Basically Tencent (huge Chinese internet platform) publishes the official CV figures daily.

The other day the figures they published were vastly different to the official figures and were later taken down.

Some are saying the numbers shown are the 'real' numbers before censorship.

Like I said - bucket of salt to be taken with this one.

www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3871594

Once it hits a developing country with no big government infrastructure then it’s game ov

MyHair, sadly this would be likely true

I worry for all of those whom rely on foodbanks in the uk also, basically anyone whom can not spend money on preparedness. But the people that are in developing countries and those places in the world that are the poorest will be hit the hardest.

I do worry that we've seen no confirmed cases in Africa. There is significant Africa/China travel due to students and large Chinese infrastructure projects in Africa and yet...not one case confirmed.

Is that too good to be true?

@shanghai I hope you're ok. Sounds very stressful.