Ask HN: What can we personally do to prep for the coronavirus? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What can we personally do to prep for the coronavirus?

6 pointsarikr2 comments

I’m guessing buy a bunch of non perishable food, a can opener, and a bunch of bottled water, so that we can hold up in our house if needed.

What else?

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Probably get in the habit of washing your hands as much as possible, not touching your face/eyes/nose/mouth, wear gloves when touching things in public places, and washing the gloves every time you wear them. Also, don't get too close to people. I've heard 1.5 meters is a good distance.

Just in case things get crazy, flashlights & batteries, candles, a backup cooking method like a fire pit or camping stove, first aid kit & maybe some paracord, and good knife (you don't want to end up using scissors or steak knives for everything). Maybe extra phone battery things/solar charger and a radio. Also, habitually keep your gas tank over a quarter tank if you can. There's probably a pretty good exhausting list somewhere by fema or something.

Best food prep isn't just to buy "cans of stuff", but to buy things you eat anyhow that happens to be preservable. That way, rather than blowing a lot of money on stuff you may never use, you're merely forward-loading some food spending. The ideal is to get yourself into the habit of using that stuff on a relatively regular basis, but replacing it as you use it rather than when you run out, thus keeping a buffer. In particular, you want to fight the idea that "this is my food reserve and I shouldn't touch it", because that's how you get old, useless reserves when you need them. You want to use them, you just also want to replenish them as you go, then you always have things usable if necessary. Don't forget to use it as a queue, first-in-first-out, despite the fact the physical world tends to make a stack more natural by just putting the new stuff you just bought in front.

This is a good idea for the coronavirus, sure, but more importantly, it's a good idea anyhow. Society and civilization in general are more resilient against all kinds of issues if people aren't generally starving from a single burp in the distribution networks. The coronavirus may turn out to be as much of a nothingburger for the US as SARS was, but something is going to happen somewhere to somebody (who may be you) for which reserves will be very useful.

You probably can't prep for the total collapse of civilization and even those who think they have probably haven't. But you can and should prep for interruptions and extended outages of various bits of civilization, because they do still happen. Just this last summer, in an area with generally good power reliability, we had a very large, very powerful windstorm come through and cut the power lines in literally several hundred places in the area, and dropped a tree on our local neighborhood transformer. I was without power for 5 days. But it was really just an annoyance... we were pretty much ready for it.

For coronavirus particularly, I think food and any other supplies you may need (medicines, animal food) is the main focus. I wouldn't expect to lose power or water. (Water is the worst. I've got some backup plans against that if I need to, but they won't necessarily be a lot of fun...) The worst one for us would be some of the prescription medicines we have that they won't really let us get too far in advance. (For my family, none of them are life threatening, but could be a problem.)

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