speaking as someone who served in the army national guard, this pandemic isnt nearly as devastating as a natural disaster. So long as there is still clean water, electricity, and communications systems online, you're okay.
A few tips on things that can be stocked (or should be checked) for general disaster preparedness:
0. bottles of clean water. Old milk jugs of tap h20 will do.
1. dry goods like beans and rice which are compatible with boil-water advisories. peanut butter is also good.
2. a fever reducer of some sort. even a few Acetaminophen or aspirin.
3. Cheap bar soap. dollar store or discount brand. The article is correct in that every emergency needs good hygiene. bar soap can be split up among family members.
if you're handy with technology, you should consider an amateur radio license. http://www.arrl.org/
amateur operators are absolutely appreciated by military and red cross workers as the fastest way to get in touch with affected communities.
This event is just another wake up call that we should be prepared for such an event. Having a simple supply of food, water, and other basics is essential. Extreme prepping isn’t the answer, but most people are undoubtedly unprepared for even the smallest crack in the fabric society - whether that be a virus or an weather disaster.
"Pandemic. It's been a while since the highly developed world experienced a devastating outbreak, but it may be premature to flat out dismiss the risk. In 1918, an unusual strain of flu managed to kill 75 million people."
Well, this aged well! I'm glad to see this very reasonable take so far.
One thing that I don't see mentioned is a "go-bag" or "bug out bag", which I find to be one of the more useful preparations. Have a bag with some clothes, your documents, medication, whatever you might need if you need to leave your house in a couple of minutes notice for a couple of days. Super useful even if it's not a total life and death emergency, but you need to see or help someone, and won't know for how long. A lot of good advice here about what to put in it though! And a lot of useful advice on good skills to have.
One other small note: always have a roll of paper towels and toilet paper in your trunk in a bag. Just trust me on this one, you'll thank me later.
There's also this one talking about a flood under Prepare Now:
> If you are able to, set aside items like soap, hand sanitizer that contains at least 60 percent alcohol, disinfecting wipes, and general household cleaning supplies that you can use to disinfect surfaces you touch regularly. After a flood, you may not have access to these supplies for days or even weeks. Keep in mind each person’s specific needs, including medication.
Most likely this was prepared quickly by pulling content from other preparedness pages. (which is really ok, a lot of preparedness works for most emergencies, although some more editing would be nice)
I wouldn’t be too worried. The best things you can do to prepare are often the same kinds of other disaster prep you should do. Have a couple of weeks of water stored safely in your house. Have a small emergency supply of food. Have a well stocked first aid kit (watch for expirations). Have a battery powered portable radio.
Such a kit will have the high value things you’ll need for a wide array of emergencies (hurricane, extended power outages, other natural disasters, etc).
This is general advice for earthquakes and other disasters:
- As soon possible, gather fresh water. Drain the pipes in sinks and showerheads; if you don't have enough containers, fill up the bathtub.
- Have non-perishable food on hand (cans mostly). Mind the expiration date.
- Have a deadbolt (if you are worried about your neighbors).
- Invest in a good first aid kit and learn how to use it. They sell larger ones designed to live in your car or home (not the portable, throw-in-backpack kind).
Putting aside the small, but non-zero possibility of WWIII, I think having some emergency supplies on hand is always a wise thing.
There's always floods and other local emergencies.
Or a drunk driver hits a local power line that makes a mess of a lot of your life until it gets fixed, which doesn't necessarily happen right away. Having some extra supplies on hand (say candles and cooking fuel and some meals you can make) might make your life a lot more pleasant while you wait for a few days for that to be fixed.
You don't need to dig out a doomsday bunker and max out your credit cards today to fill it with rice and beans and canned goods, but buying a reasonable amount of extra supplies for an emergency is always a good idea.
And you should be prepping with food and other goods you'll eventually eat anyway, making it a very low-cost activity. Just rotate through older cans to ensure freshness.
The best way to prepare for COVID-19 is to already be prepared for a wide variety of civic disruptions.
Have enough food and water on hand to shelter in place for up to 2 weeks. Never let your gasoline dip below a quarter tank. Have some paperback books and candles on hand. Have some duct tape and plastic drop cloths. Keep some camping gear. Practice not panicking. Keep a bottle of plain, unscented bleach on hand, and practice diluting it to 10% of the bottle concentration.
If you don't already have supplies specific to COVID-19, the desperate and the hoarders have probably already snapped up what you might want, and the opportunists reselling it at a 400% markup.
Preparing for natural disasters and emergencies is a reasonable facet of life strategy. Disaster preparedness can be useful when more conventional strategies for dealing with life needs (education, a good career, saving) are temporarily less viable in the face of extreme conditions. I say this because prepping is part of a life plan not the entirety of a life plan.
Many of the lists that exist are useful places to start. 3 days of food and water, utility shut off tools, flashlights (don't forget the extra batteries) and the like are good basics. Prescription medications are often overlooked in preparations. Waste disposal and sanitation can also be issues if one has to shelter in place in an urban setting.
This post could turn quickly into a TLDR nightmare so let me throw out a few more specialized items I like that are beyond the basics:
1. Auerbach's Wilderness Medicine. This massive two volume text is the gold standard for medicine in austere environments. It comes with online access which makes wading through it much easier.
2. Powerfilm solar collapsible solar panel. The US military uses these panels. They are well made and durable. They are expensive but it's better to have one of these that works instead of a cheapy that doesn't.
3. Multi-tool and sturdy folding knife. The ability to cut and shape things as well as apply torque can be extremely invaluable.
4. There are a lot of engineers on this site. A basic HAM license is easy to get and in some areas HF is a reasonable alternative to modern networks.
5. A friend who went through Katrina as a surgeon at a level 1 trauma center said sat phones lose utility quickly as media outlets tend to lock up bandwidth.
6. Plastic sheeting - A few rolls of 8-10 mil plastic sheeting
7. MSR Dromedary Bags - Love them. You can go a long time without food. Water not so much.
Don't forget your brain. Lots of smart people here on HN. Think about contingencies. How will I leave if there if there is no gasoline? Where will I meet my loved ones if we are separated? What do I have that will be valuable if for some period of time cash is not so valuable? Are my preparations easy to access and have I practiced with any items that require skill such as fire building or water purification?
Don't get lost in the rabbit hole. List the conditions you are realistically likely to encounter and plan for those. If you live in Hays, Kansas plan for tornadoes not terrorism.
If we are envisioning a single “nuclear explosion” (not a large nuclear attack), then this advice is not as crazy as it might seem. Think terrorism, or accident. If you survive the initial event, and the rest of the country is immediately in a position to render aid, then your objective is just to stay healthy and safe for the 1-4 days it would take to start getting things sorted out. In that scenario, access to clean water, first aid, and not getting covid actually seem like reasonable things to worry about.
There’s not really any good advice in a MAD scenario. Only a tiny faction of people would be able to set out for the wilderness and survive. The vast majority will die of exposure of one kind or another regardless of how much prepping they do.
I already maintain a 90+ day supply of food and medications and most consumables/supplies in my homes, as a matter of course. I took the lessons of the Battle of Berlin to heart. I also have a half dozen P99/P100 masks already, for the same reason.
The only specific measure I am taking is stocking up on drinking water, my supplies of which fluctuate between 15 and 30 days as I consume
it and periodically reorder. I am bumping that to 60 on the off chance that there is a major pandemic.
I am one of the high-mortality-risk groups for any respiratory ailment (which is why I religiously get flu shots each year), so it’s entirely possible I will just stay home for a few weeks/months while I wait for any potential outbreak to blow over.
I’ve spent about $300 to prepare, that includes paying a lazy fee ordering some stuff off Amazon, and optimizing for things I’ll eat in April if this all blows over.
Food and water:
Added 25 gallons to my normal water delivery
Protein bars, jerky, dehydrated cheese
Peanuts, trail mix, peanut butter
Big sack of rice (save for earthquake kit after April, don’t
usually eat rice)
Canned chili, canned stew, canned beans (Carry over to earthquake kit)
Canned tuna
All of this (sans water) is boxed and in a closet.
Supplies:
Already have plenty of n95s
9x12 plastic tarp
Duct tape (specific for this use, not relying on the roll in the drawer)
Bleach
Extra soap and toilet paper
Big thing of hand sanitizer (noticed a lot of out of stock on Amazon)
I already have a significant medical kit.
I’m mostly optimizing for people panicking and it becoming hard to get supplies for a week or two.
In Jan/Feb of 2020, I spent a lot of time "preparing" for the Coronavirus:
- I built a pantry and stocked it with foods for storage. Beans and cheerios and powdered milk, etc. It turns out that in addition to these, I eat perishable foods, so I routinely had to go to the grocery store anyway. And while I was there, I bought regular milk, because eww.
- I bought a bunch of 5-gallon carboys and filled them up with water in case, y'know, the apocalypse. Never had a water problem (thankfully).
- I stocked up on bleach, masks, and other PPE. And of course it turned out the bleach wasn't super useful because the virus spread mainly through the air. The masks were the only effective prep I made, but then I felt extremely bad about hoarding them from healthcare workers and old people and ended up giving them away.
My point is, there's a wide range of scenarios between public health crisis and full-blown Mad Max. Not preparing for a specific one of these is preparing for none of them, and preparing for a specific one is not preparing for all the others.
I've already been preparing as a hobby for the last 3 years, not specifically for coronavirus, but here's how I'm prepared for it:
- I work remotely, so I can hunker down at home and have my income totally unaffected.
- I've close to 6 months worth of food, and I've been buying more in the last month as the news continues. I can give some tips on what I think is good inexpensive food to get in case anyone is interested.
- I'm fasting regularly, which will realistically extend my food supply. Most people calculate their food supply by 3 meals a day plus snacks, but you can go days without eating. Right now I'm closing in on 72 hours without food. I'm perfectly fine. You get used to it. The key is getting your electrolytes and getting out of your sugar addiction.
- I have lots of water stored up, although that's not going to be much of a problem with COVID-19. Several filters meant to remove viruses, though I have a distiller so I would probably just use that if I was really that paranoid about my water, which I probably won't be.
- My medicine cabinet has everything you can think of and more. I have 2 first aid kits and a trauma kit. I have what it takes to turn the entrance to my home into a decon chamber, if need be. I have tons of bleach and disinfectants.
- I have full gas masks with filters, including adapters for 3M filters, which should be perfectly sufficient to remove droplets in the air. I also have full tyvek suits in case there's a worst case scenario but I have to leave my home. I have lots of N95 masks, but obviously you can't count on those for very much. I certainly don't have the belief that even the gas masks will prevent anything. It's just hedging my bets.
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All that said, I am not paranoid. I don't even have anxiety over it. Those things I mentioned would only come into play if things went extremely bad. My life wouldn't be very different if I had to stay indoors for months on end, so long as utilities continue to operate. Even if the supply chain broke down, I would probably be better off staying indoors than trying to bug out to somewhere else.
One other thing I'm doing is trying to sell off a high value items I've been holding on to, but I'm selling them off now because the money could save me from strife if there's widespread infection and my job totally falls apart.
Stockpile some water, too, and some fuel for a stove. (Hey, stockpile the stove as well.) Spares of any medicines you take, if you can. Some toilet paper. And some spare gasoline. This is pretty much the same as a decent emergency stash, which you should have anyway.
Very few of us expect an actual Mad Max-style scenario. Most preppers simply prepare for anything, as you simply don't know what the future holds. Personally, I found keeping a supply of N95's at home to be very handy in the current pandemic. We've also kept the store-runs to a minimum simply by living off some of the supplies we have at home, as well as our own produce.
I suspect most preppers agree that if shit hits the fan and zombies start walking the streets, cooperation is key for survival and rebuilding, and that simple things like getting to know your neighbours can be quite critical for survival in such scenarios. After all, sitting in a bunker with a ton of canned food is pretty pointless unless your kids have someone to procreate with.
There's two elements of prep work that anybody can and should do: 1. The cheap stuff that you may never use, but if you don't, isn't that big a deal: First aid kits, a supply of disinfectant, masks if it isn't already too late for that, etc. 2. Stuff you're going to buy anyhow, like canned food you already use, stuff you can easily freeze in advance without it being too big a deal, etc., that, again, you would have used anyhow. This is just pulling purchases forward rather than spending new money.
After all, just because COVID-19 may in fact end up contained doesn't mean you're not going to be in a serious earthquake next week or something. Having this stuff widely distributed greatly increases the resiliency of society against all sorts of issues, means you'll be one less person draining valuable resources in case of some disaster, etc. Being at least a bit prepped is the socially responsible thing to do.
Also, don't forget some of the specialized things for an extended in-home stay, which a lot of prep lists don't necessarily focus on (as a lot of them are assuming the problem is that you don't have a home anymore): Toilet paper, paper towels, salt & spices, etc. Anything you don't want to have to suddenly run out and get.
A few tips on things that can be stocked (or should be checked) for general disaster preparedness:
0. bottles of clean water. Old milk jugs of tap h20 will do. 1. dry goods like beans and rice which are compatible with boil-water advisories. peanut butter is also good.
2. a fever reducer of some sort. even a few Acetaminophen or aspirin.
3. Cheap bar soap. dollar store or discount brand. The article is correct in that every emergency needs good hygiene. bar soap can be split up among family members.
if you're handy with technology, you should consider an amateur radio license. http://www.arrl.org/ amateur operators are absolutely appreciated by military and red cross workers as the fastest way to get in touch with affected communities.
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