Prepping for a pandemic...6

[wheresmymojo]

6th thread on prepping for a pandemic and following the risk of a COVID pandemic.

Anxiety

As Preppers we tend to look at a reasonable worst case scenario to plan for. Everyone is welcome on the thread but if you find it makes you anxious be kind to yourself and think about sticking to once daily updates from the BBC or similar

General COVID Info

The estimated replication rate is R= 2 to 4 based on latest expert estimates. This means each infected person spreads the virus to between 2 and 4 people. Experts estimate that, unchecked, it could infect 60% of the population.

Around 15-20% of cases are thought to be severe - that is resulting in the need for hospitalisation. Around 3-5% requiring ventilation.

The estimated mortality rate is around 1-2% at the moment (compared to 0.01-0.1% for flu). This may change as it is very difficult to estimate mortality.

Children tend to have milder symptoms. Those over 60 with underlying health issues and a history of smoking are more likely to be severe (although not exclusively this type of person).

Spread of COVID

It is estimated that the average incubation period is 3-5 days but can be as long as 24 days.

It can be spread with no symptoms.

It can be spread via droplet (cough/sneeze), aerosol (breathing same air in very close quarters), bodily fluids, fecal/oral route and formites (via surfaces, up to 28 days in the right circumstances but up to 3-5 days in more typical circumstances).

Updates

As this is a novel virus and knowledge is constantly being updated - I will post updates as they become available with links to source.

I am not a medical expert so any opinions or conjecture of my own should be taken with a pinch of salt!

Prepping Scenarios

Most of us are prepping for the following situations:

• Wanting to stay indoors for 2-4 weeks + in case of a local outbreak / schools being closed

• Potentially being ill with a flu type illness lasting 2-3 weeks with one or more of the household having the illness

• Having to take a family member to hospital for COVID or any other reason during an outbreak

Prepping Items

Threads 1&2 have lists of things to think about to prep for the first scenario as do the Brexit prepping threads.

Main differences/additions to something like the Brexit list are:

• Face masks if you can get them for any trips you have to make in public during an outbreak. These don't offer full protection and cannot be 100% relied upon but are probably better than nothing if you make sure you wear them correctly and dispose of them correctly. N95 masks are best but expensive and harder to wear, surgical face masks are second best. Dust masks are not going to help.

• Hand sanitiser needs to be 60% or more alcohol content

• Dettol / bleach / Miltons to disinfect. Not all disinfectants work but these three do

• Plenty of at home/over counter treatments for flu type symptoms should you need to treat at home

• Tissues (lots of) should you catch the virus

• Think about meals that are easy to cook and eat should you be ill or both parents be ill at the same time (soup for example)

• For a potential hospital trip you may want to prep a 'go bag' should you need to take someone to hospital with the virus (or anything else) during an outbreak. See Thread 1&2 for examples of what people are packing

• Frequent and thorough hand washing, not touching your face and social distancing (no handshakes, hugs, etc) are some of the most effective ways to stay virus free

Other Thoughts

India have announced that they are stopping exports of some antibiotics, hormone treatments and vitamin supplements as they rely on China for raw materials.

Many factories that supplied fibre for use in sanitary towels and tampons are being diverted to manufacture face masks. Consider stocking up or changing to sustainable items (cloth STs, mooncup, period pants)

Hello, thanks for new thread.
Stopped by Home Bargains and added a few more things. Feeling pretty organised now. Still need light bulbs.
I was thinking of making things like rice with sweet and sour sauce (jar) and veg (tinned/frozen) or a curry with tinned potatoes. I've plenty of pasta, sauce, chicken nuggets and things DS likes.
Today I've been on 3 buses, walked through a shopping centre, Home Bargains, McDonald's, been to uni, eaten in a canteen, watched DS swimming lesson...makes you think, if it's already spreading here undetected then it's impossible to avoid really.

On saturday when I went to home bargains they had a shelf full of big bottles of hand gel. Today the whole shelf was empty.

My dd works for home bargains they have not had any hand gel for over a week now.

I have ordered some more of the hospital strength hand gel from Superdrugs. It was back in stock this morning.

Read an interesting article today on a German website. The pandemic experts that if the virus does really become a pandemic, the response will change. No more travel bans or quarantine, as the virus is no longer contained anyway, but cancelling of large events, like concerts, closing of cinemas, etc, offering working from.home where possible, to manage the spread so health services can deal with a more staggered infection rate. Makes sense to me. Quarantine really only works when there are few cases.

@wheresmymojo I dont think you over over edging anything but as you were saying about swine flu it is so hard to know how serious it is at the moment. As it is flu season anyway and most of the people with CV only have mild symptoms there will be thousands that just brush it off as a cold. they say even with the mild symptoms it wont even seem like flu just a cough and a runny nose. That happens to me 5 or 6 times a year but im not going to assume i have CV or see a doctor about it.

if some of the reports from china that state hundreds of thousands of people are probably infected although that may make it sound scary amount of people put then it could actually put the death rate down to about 0.5.

It would be silly to use the figures from Italy at the moment as first due to the huge increase in a small amount of time it would indicate that the virus has been there for a while and probably thousands of people there are already infected but again they will not have all been to the doctors or assumed they had cv before a couple of days ago. Plus the people that have died there are either very unwell anyway [cancer patient] other existing conditions or elderly so when people use these figures to say it could wipe out 2% of the population of Britain they are just plucking numbers out of nowhere.

Again im like you i like to try and work things out for myself instead of just reading the papers etc.

An easy meal idea - packet hot dogs have a relatively long life (a month, I think) plus pasta and jar of pasta sauce is a firm favourite with my kids. It’s one of my go-to meals when I’m exhausted

Thank you for the new thread. I remember being quite concerned about ebola a few years back. I couldn't imagine how they could get it back under control when they had so many cases. I'm still not completely sure how or why it died out, though obviously the US interventions played an important part.

Something I really don't understand is how and why diseases stop spreading or to put it another way, why didn't we ALL get swine flu? Is there some underlying resistance in a population? It's not a question I've ever seen answered. If SARS-COV-2 is airborne and can survive on surfaces, why is the R0 only 2-3? What is it that means people can come into contact with the virus and NOT get it? Sometimes half my family contract the same cold, and half don't... what decides who does and doesn't? Is this chance based on a property of the virus, or is it a property of the person, or a combination of the person and the virus? Is the R0 only 2-3 until its already infected a certain more vulnerable section of the population, and then when only the more resistant ones are left, it drops below 1 and dies out?

All I do know is that extrapolation is much less reliable than interpolation. I'm preparing for the worst, but still extremely hopeful that some mechanism I don't fully understand will come into play and prevent this becoming as widespread as our worst fears.

Thanks for all the prepping threads, they are so useful and I, for one, really appreciate them.

Place marking. Threads are filling up fast. Thank you Mojo.

We've got snow here today and roads where chaotic this morning and online orders are chaotic due to vehicles getting stuck so we've gone into Tesco to get a few bits, not many people there but plenty on shelves.

I saw a lady leaving after purchasing half a trolley full of carex hand wash and nothing else. Was expecting to find the shelves empty of the stuff but plenty still in stock. Saw 10kg bags of rice and pasta piled up which I've never seen in there before but maybe that's because I've not looked, I do most of my shopping online

More worryingly was the lady who served us , after general mentioning the weather she tells me it was supposed to be her day off but she'd been called in to cover for a sick colleague and that he'd been unwell with various things including pneumonia and he was off sick "again" trying to get a GP appointment and had texted her to say they think he has coronovirus. She didn't seem concerned about the risk to health and was more annoyed at having to cover for him for two weeks.

I'm not going to lie, it's freaked me a bit, and part of me wanted to ask her which GP surgery the bloke went to and where he lives in case he lives in the same place as me and used the same GP, but the rational part of me knows she'd get in trouble for telling me and there's nothing I could do with that info anyway. There's also the chance that it's all just gossiping.

++++++++ IMPORTANT INFO ABOUT SURGICAL MASKS vs FFP1 , FFP2 ,..

I would like to make a correction about the opening post concerning surgical masks being better than dust masks. This is not correct for the low FFp1

IMPORTANT PAPER TO READ
www.hse.gov.uk/research/rrpdf/rr619.pdf

Respirators used in building works come indifferent types and sizes. There is the typical paper dust mask which is I agree almost useless but then the followings come in

FFP1 80% filtration
FFP2 94 % filtration (these are the N95 )
FFp3 99% filtration

These have been tested against surgical masks and even the lowest FFP1 was performing better than surgical masks (29 vs 4) as Surgical mask protect agains large splashes of body fluid carrying bacteria and viruses but not through their filtering .

"The FFP respirators provided about 11.5 to 15.9 times better protection than the SMs, suggesting that SMs are not a good substitute for FFP respirators when concerns exist about airborne transmission of bacterial and viral pathogens. About 18.3% of the tested FFP2 respirators had PFs

I have a reasonable stash as generally inclined to prepping. I've also bought some formula as I'm breastfeeding my 12 week old-if ill my supply could go down rapidly.

You can get jars of hot dogs which probably last even longer than a month.

Scrambled eggs I love with a bit of smoky chorizo chopped up in. Or smoked salmon which takes up no freezer space

Someone mentioned curry with potato. You can also make a great curry with tinned chickpeas and frozen spinach.

I think the key is to use sauces to add flavour eg pasta could be with tomato sauce or pesto or mushroom sauce or cheese sauce. Add chicken, minced beef, frozen veg or onion if you have it.

Chicken and rice could be curry, sweet and sour, sweet chili, Katsu sauce, risotto with peas

Pepper, mayo, dried herbs and spices, jars of sauces can all change what is essentially the same ingredients.

Thanks @LeGrandBleu useful information.

Can someone help me with chicken soup please? Looking for larger amounts and wondering how powdered compares to tins as I expect takes up less space.

Lunch could be quesadillas..some of the wraps are long life, tinned regrows beans, grated cheese, finely chopped onion and jarred jalapeños
Cous cous with olive oil and lemon juice..roasted squash, jarred peppers, some parsley from one of those living plants
Risotto..any way

Fruit is my concern..anyone successfully stored apples wrapped in newspaper in a crate before? I've read about it and wondered if it might work for some root veg too?
I don't think my kids would eat any tinned fruit!

So tonight my littlest (4yo, low immunity, several underlying health conditions including congenital heart defect) has a fever. It's a low fever and accompanied by signs of upper respiratory infection whereas I know CV19 is lower respiratory but still scary. She is fine in herself but my anxiety is climbing

Another Italian death just announced. 62 year old man.

@Notstrongandstable my understanding is that newspaper accelerate ripping. A friend of mine is an avocado farmer and whenever he brings me avocados, he tells me to wrap the one I want to eat in newspaper.

Have you consider apple sauce? It is quite yummy and very easy to do. Cut apple into tiny piece, put in small pot. Cover with water enough to only cover the apple and let simmer for 20 - 30 min covered . add more water if necessary

Or oven roasted apples? Remove the core with the special tool leaving apples whole. Put in a backing dish with 1 cm of water and into high temperature oven until they cracked and some fruit start oozing out of the hole.

Frozen berries is a good option as well. You can also freeze in ice cube trays freshly squeezed lemon juice.

@ItsNotJustTheFuckingFlu - you’ve got me worried too. We had snow too and I was so relieved when the Tesco delivery arrived this morning. On time - which was amazing considering how many roads were shut.

notstrong you can store root vegetables in sand in a cool dark place.

I’ve finally caved and ordered some masks from ebay. In the five minutes I had them in my basket another 51 sold.
My family think I’m mad, but I’d rather be over than under prepared.

My DDs are in school. And the local boarding school had pupils from almost every country. Apparently, according to DD’s friend, the boarders whose home is outside the UK they were not allowed to go “home” for half term. They had to stay here with their UK guardians.

While I don’t consider myself a pepper I am considered about this. Not least because DH travels for work. It’s usually only South America but also EU countries.

He is going to B&Q tomorrow for DIY supplies. He’s going to get masks.

Coronavirus kills 12 in Iran, 61 infected: health ministry t.co/PNdtPIpq3L t.co/ayx8EFKJP8

amp.theguardian.com/world/2020/feb/24/government-to-shut-schools-if-there-was-uk-coronavirus-outbreak?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other&__twitter_impression=true
Government to shut schools if there was UK coronavirus outbreak

No 10 planning for ‘all eventualities’ if number of coronavirus cases surge in UK