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Comment by James_Henry | Hacker News Reader

I haven't seen any good guides for individual and household preparedness, but I think that this guide "Interim Guidance for Preventing the Spread of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) in Homes and Residential Communities" (https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/guidance-preve...), especially the precautions section, can be a useful place to see what would be needed to prepare.

Some things to have besides food storage and a normal supply of medicine would be to have cleaning supplies, maybe gloves and rubbing alcohol, and perhaps face masks. One issue is that face masks may be good to keep available for those who need it most. I'm not sure what is best practice to ensure you aren't taking face masks from healthcare providers or someone more in need.

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A good overview food storage guide.

http://extensionpublications.unl.edu/assets/pdf/ec446.pdf

These storage guidelines are incredibly paranoid.

Milk does not go bad a week after opening. Eggs don't spoil after two to four weeks in the fridge. A bag of bacon in the freezer isn't going to end you because it sat there for three months. Fruit juice doesn't go bad in 3 days. Butter doesn't go bad after two weeks at room temperate, let alone in a fridge.

Agreed. Eggs can last 3 months outside a fridge, and yes, that includes eggs in the us.

> Eggs can last 3 months outside a fridge, and yes, that includes eggs in the us.

Commercially bought eggs in the US need to be refrigerated because they remove the outer antibiotic coating before sending them to stores.

Partly true. The washing process removes the natural coating, but this is replaced by a synthetic coating. GP is correct.

> because they remove the outer antibiotic coating before sending them to stores.

The coating is oil from the chicken, and they wash it and replace it with mineral oil, which works just as well.

I speak from experience: I have not refrigerated US bought eggs for around 10 years. Not a single problem.

If you keep them un-refrigerated for more than 2 months (which I did because there was a really good deal, so I bought a lot), the eggs are not fresh, the yolk falls apart easily. (So not great in certain recipes.)

However they are not spoiled or anything like that, and the taste is unchanged.

If eggs are oiled and refrigerated, they'll last more like 8 or 9 months. I think the oiling is an old maritime technique, but came across it wintering at South Pole.

Of course, 3 months is plenty for the present discussion.

That really does depend upon your definition of room tempreature. I'm pretty sure anything above about 30 degrees C will put pay to many food stuffs in fairly short order. Everybodies storage conditions differ, tempreature, humidity and light exposure all have an impact on how long foods will safely store.

The other element is how the item is handled. Traditional bacon stored in brine can last for months in most conditions however I would not attempt to store opened bacon for more than a week or so. Likewise if you have raw meat, it is all about what it has been exposed to that can make it dangerous. Cooked meat, if uncontaminated and cooked through can last for quiet a while and still be safe. Once contaminated it can become dangerous quiet quickly.

Do the N95 face masks that you can buy at the grocery even do anything to prevent the spread of coronavirus?

From what I understand n95 masks should work when used properly.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/respirator-use...

They certainly help people from touching their noses and mouthes, which we do all the time unconsciously and is a vector for transmission.

My understanding is that the main purpose of the mask is to prevent people who are already infected from coughing and sneezing particulate onto other people.

This is true, but it also prevents you from touching your own face.

That's a surgical mask

Not really, other than limiting spread from someone who is potentially infected and making it harder for someone to touch their face (virus on hands getting into body via eyes/nose).

N95 masks will also limit the spread from someone who is actually infected, too. So the masks will, when used correctly help limit all spread and I am not sure why you say "not really".

But I should add, the CDC only recommends face masks for the infected and limits recommendation of N95 respirators to healthcare providers and those in workplace settings.

People generally aren’t going to use them correctly, aren’t going to change them frequently enough, are likely to touch their face frequently if not used to the mask, and aren’t nearly as concerned about infecting others so much as protecting themselves.

Should you go buy some? Probably jot

No, they do almost nothing once they become moist.

N95 masks are complicated to fit properly. For it to work you need a proper seal. The CDC says there is no general sizing guideline and recommends that the fit be tested yearly. I'm unsure how to go about doing this as an inexperienced individual.

my take on this is that those masks are probably useless, and even if they were useful, most members of the public will not utilize them correctly.

so, i advise people to leave the face masks of all types for utilization by our healthcare workers, as there will soon be a shortage and as a member of the public you should mostly be sitting at home rather than wandering around areas with other people anyway.

The CDC is telling people to use face masks (not necessarily n95 or p100 respirators) when ill or around those that are ill.

Without getting to far into it, not really.

Theoretically they can... But practically there are so many routes to failure, the average person cannot use it.

If you were the guy with impeccable lab technique... Maybe.

This isn't true. Someone with general intelligence can figure out how to use one of these things correctly, and I think that people who care to figure it out will do exactly that.

This proves not to be the case. Even intelligent people who are not used to wearing a mask will find that they regularly compromise the masks efficacy.

If worn by infected people it can reduce the spread, but if this is the case the infected person should not be around others anyway.

I'm not knowledgeable about the efficacy of the masks themselves, but I suspect there's a forest-for-the-trees issue, here. There are at least a few ways to think about whether masks (broadly, or any specific mask) "work"...

- Whether wearing a mask makes it less likely someone will pick up an infection in constant conditions (direct mask efficacy, reduced touching, etc.)

- Whether wearing a mask makes it less likely someone will transmit an infection in constant conditions.

- Whether wearing a mask leads infected people to spend more time around others.

- Whether wearing a mask leads uninfected people to spend more time around others.

- Whether the way masks end up getting allocated in the event of a shortage promotes or inhibits spread at population scale (for example, if masks ended up overallocated towards people who're so concerned that they stay home anyways and away from people who don't have the ability to).

Good questions. You remind me of some of the arguments against wearing a helmet on a bike. In particular, real studies show that automobile drivers are more careful in the presence of bikers without helmets - that is, if you're wearing a helmet, drivers are more careless around you.

Someone texting, driving drunk, or not paying attention is still gonna hurt you more without a helment though.

And sometimes you just fall on your own as well. Out of the few times I’ve met the ground while biking, I’d estimate roughly half to be because I lost balance after hitting a pothole I didn’t see or ice/snow/rain making my bicycle slide. I was glad to have a helmet in these cases.

I'm not making an argument against helmets, partly because I don't know if that effect is large enough to overcome the additional safety of the helmet. I'm just trying to illustrate that sometimes there are non-obvious offsetting effects.

Apart from keeping you from touching your face, they raise the alarm on those that see you, so they tend to keep their distance.

https://sentido-labs.com/es/biblioteca/coronavirus-2020-02-L...

(Text and video subtitles are in Spanish, but sound is the original English)

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