San Francisco declares state of emergency to prepare for coronavirus
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/SF-mayor-London-...
> There have been no confirmed coronavirus cases in San Francisco to date, but as infections continue to rise across the world, “we need to allocate more resources to make sure we are prepared,” Breed said at a press conference announcing the emergency declaration.
> “To be clear, this declaration of emergency is all about preparedness. By declaring a state of emergency we are prioritizing the safety of our communities by being prepared.”
"""ix people have tested positive for the new coronavirus in California — two in Southern California and the four people now in the Bay Area. The San Benito County patients, who are both 57, were at home until early Monday, when they were taken by ambulance to UCSF after their symptoms suddenly worsened. They are being cared for in isolation at the hospital.
In a statement, UCSF said that it “specializes in the care of patients with complex illnesses, including infectious diseases like the novel coronavirus.” Doctors there “also treated patients during past epidemics, such as SARS in 2003.”"""
(of all the places in the US you'd want to treat patients while studying them, UCSF is one of the top ones. They really are experts in infectious diseases).
if theres not enough money around the emergency rules will still be in effect
They are unusually likely to see a small scale outbreak and effective early responses could make a huge difference.
You want to react the appropriate amount. For the time being, you should go about your normal routine, but like the CDC said today, you should prepare for some major lifestyle disruptions.
The amount of absolute garbage information flooding the internet right now has caused a lot of folks I know to freak out, when the relative risk of this virus is lower than any number of other things they do on a daily basis without a second thought.
So yes, wash your hands more, try to avoid large crowds amd have a plan for when they cancel your kid’s school or whatever, but don’t start a run on canned goods at the local grocery store. It’s important to maintain perspective.
Hoarding canned food from your local store hurts everyone, because now they have less food.
Everything we do has consequences.
The fact that a simple acknowledgement that hoarding is objectively worse than avoiding large crowds is voted down to -1, should tell you everything you need to know about the sense of panic that is sweeping the internet right now.
Plenty of food and water to last at least seven days, evacuation meeting points etc. Oh and a wrench for those pesky gas mains.
I'm always a little bemused to see food and water given equal weight in preparedness recommendations like this. If you have no food at all for seven days, that won't really cause problems. If you're only planning for a seven-day emergency, there's no reason to store any amount of food.
If you have water for 7 days and food for 3 months, the lack of water will cause a lot of problems.
I've done a few 5-7 day juice fasts starting at ~600 calories per day--all sugar as fat and protein prevent hunger from subsiding. After the hunger subsides it's easier to taper off entirely. The hard part is dealing with stress. Even though it's common to experience a mental high and to even perform well athletically, the difficulty with stress betrays the fact that your body has declining energy.
I went from a 3000 calorie/day diet to a 1000 calorie/day diet for 8 months several years back. A few years after that, I once went 4 full days without food (it sucked, but I was mentally prepared due to my experience from that 3k to 1k diet change).
The change in energy will mess with your head/body for about a week until you get used to it.
Edit: People keep downvoting the parent, but I'm not sure why, just because the information comes from someone who does "fasts"?
I think that statement was easily misinterpreted.
After not eating you start to feel hungry. After a couple of days, that hunger will fade. Eating fat or protein will satiate that hunger but will sort of reset that timer on the hunger going away entirely.
I think the idea is you do a 7 day fast, eating a small amount of sugar during the first ~3 hungry days.
Fat and protein giving satiation refers to your hunger subsiding because you're full.
Whereas "eating all sugar as fat and protein prevent hunger from subsiding" refers to the phenomenon that when you're starving, you stop feeling hungry despite the fact that you aren't full. Presumably, consuming sugar doesn't interfere with this, while consuming fat or protein does.
I think you've got that inverted.
People easing into intermittent fasting are often recommended they start with keto to get fat-as-fuel adapted and begin their intermittent fasts with a few days of keto for the very reason that it gets through the hunger pangs while still being able to eat, just avoiding carbs.
"Civilization is only three meals deep." — My old boss.
If it comes to that, your “neighbors” aren’t going to be sitting around doing yoga to feel less hungry.
You and the people talking about civilization only being 3 days away from anarchy are talking about "desperate people".
I don't think anyone is confusing the two groups of people; just talking about two different possibilities for different people.
It’s a much different situation than an earthquake, nothing is going to damage the water lines in this case. Does the water grid require a lot of active maintenance on a daily basis that it’s at risk of shutting off if there are a few weeks where nobody is working?
I strongly disagree with this characterization.
Sure, technically, most people aren't going to literally die, if they go without food for a couple days.
But I think that you underestimate the secondary effects that not having food for a couple days has on a person.
but why would i do that to myself when i could easily buy protein bars and canned goods?
Suppose on day four fire breaks out and you need to evacuate. Your ability to walk long distances, carry others with injuries, and think clearly and make good decisions about how to evacuate will all be impacted by a lack of food.
When I was in a mild emergency one thing the experts did that stood out to me was forcing us all to take a break and cook a warm meal. It made a significant difference to perceived energy level and judgement, even if it wasn't strictly necessary.
It does wonders for morale, otherwise it's really not that necessary unless you're running exceptionally low in the adipose department to begin with.
My belief, however, (without experience) is that after a few days of no food the physical feeling of hunger will start being very distracting, and you'll start feeling lethargic. I believed that was the case even if you were well nourished before. Not because you run out of fat to burn but because your body starts minimizing usage. Is that totally wrong?
People often describe the same things about ketogenic diets and fasting, which are both fat burning modes.
The issue is if you only get into the flux state where you're in between modes. That's where you're hangry, irritable, and can't focus because all you can think about is your hunger. In that condition feeding restores normal operation, and can seem like the only path to recovery.
But it actually passes eventually, and what happens afterwards seems kind of remarkable if you've never done it before.
Water is a different story, but food is really quite optional until the fat buffers start experiencing underruns and your muscles start getting cannibalized, then you're starting to get into trouble.
We've evolved to not just struggle through periods of food scarcity, we actually perform well and can be surprisingly athletic without food. It makes sense to me, since when we're without food we need to be on our game and go find some or eventually we'd die.
When fasting, for me anyways, it really feels like a keyed-up high-alert almost stimulated mode of operating. I've gone on long hikes and runs after not eating for multiple days, it's kind of preferable now so I don't have to carry any food and it's more pleasant to do physical activities with an empty abdomen.
Edit:
Above where I wrote "feeding restores normal operation", I'm assuming that "normal operation" isn't a ketogenic diet, and feeding includes carbs.
People already in ketosis don't go through this suffering phase when starting a fast, because it already happened when they ceased consuming carbs.
But I would say definitely store food and medicine. Keeping your energy levels up is important for maintaining your health. Getting ill is just another way to die.
You definitely want to boil river or lake water.
“Safe is anywhere a hungry person can't walk in three days.”
There are also some concerns about medicines unrelated to the virus because many meds are produced in China and the supply chain here is all screwed up. So some might consider getting medicine refills for 30 days (or however long your insurance will let you) in advance. You also might not want to have to go wait in line at a pharmacy during a pandemic.
In terms of work: it may make sense to start thinking about what kind of work can be done efficiently remotely vs. on-site.
You also may want to think about finances in case the world sees a significant economic contraction. If lots of countries replicate what has happened in China, the world economy will be highly disrupted for at least a couple months.
Is it me, or does this completely abuse the meaning of "state of emergency"?
"Declaring a State of emergency" sounds better than "begging for more federal money"
The only reason to declare such a thing is if you need those powers. So what does San Francisco need those powers for?
> The declaration of a local emergency is a legal document that will mobilize City resources, accelerate emergency planning, streamline staffing, coordinate agencies across the city, allow for future reimbursement by the state and federal governments and raise awareness throughout San Francisco about how everyone can prepare in the event that COVID-19 (novel coronavirus) appears in our community. Santa Clara and San Diego counties have issued similar declarations to bolster their preparedness.
In the case of a snow storm up here in upstate NY, these tend to allow for overtime and pre-positioning of equipment. I'd imagine similar scenarios here.
There also has hardly been any testing.
Source? Or are you under the impression that there's a public announcement every time someone gets tested?
Because the health care system nationally is refusing point blank to test people who have viral pneumonia even after they test negative for flu.
That doesn't mean it's necessarily a statistical artifact of the stance on testing. It could really be that Italy has been unlucky and once the infection spreads there the number of tests might be commensurate to the number of people showing symptoms.
But it can also be an artefact of the engagement rules: the WHO guideline is to perform the test under certain conditions, some of them are clinical (e.g. specific symptoms of the respiratory system) some of them are not, e.g. whether you've been in an area that has been identified as affected.
That is reasonable of course, but makes the numbers hard to compare. Imagine there are a number of undetected cases in a town in Germany, and that number is greater than whatever threshold would turn the surrounding area as a hotspot.
Now anybody that passed through that area becomes eligible for testing and it's quite possible that the number of positive test results skyrockets (possibly triggering the creation of new hotspots etc).
The situation on the ground hasn't change ; just our awareness of it (i.e. our information)
Sure some desk based jobs can be done at home but it seems like nearly every restaurant, bar, and store would likely go out of business. As would airlines, trains, maybe hotels. Grocery stores would have to go 100% delivery only? Maybe be open 24/7 so people can spread out? Or would I need to wear a hazmat suit to get food? Note: there was a family riding the bullet train in cheap hazmat suits a few days ago.
I really have no idea. I suppose you can look at cities in China and see a full response.
I see lots of people saying "prepare" but then list having a week of supplies. Seem more like you'd need 6 to 12 months of supplies. Unlike an earthquake a pandemic would hopefully not stop the water flow or electricity like say an earthquake might but conversely it will be much longer before it's declared safe to return to any normal routine.
A pandemic is going to severely hurt the economy, but it won't completely stop it. It will not be the case that nothing will be produced for months on end. People will go to work. Farmers will produce food. There will be shops. But things will also be in short supply. Prices will probably rise. Poor people will be hit harder and there will probably be some famine (or at least more than there is now). But things will still continue.
In an event like an earthquake, entire distribution lines are shut down because you can't physically get somewhere. With a pandemic, things will be in short supply because labour is in short supply.
I wonder how the extreme wealth distribution today will affect this. Although looking at statistics [1] it seems it was even worse in 1922 (no numbers for 1918).
Our leaders have their heads buried in the sand.
At least SF is trying to prepare.
The Presidential term start in late January 2021; “preparedness” isn't a relevant issue, the issue will be response to a situation that we have no clear picture today of what it will look like. Aside from knocking Trump on lack of preparedness—which is more of a general election issue that a primary debate issue—there’s not a lot for campaigns to do at this point.
Maybe you were in the kitchen getting a beer when it happened, but I saw it.
I guess you are referring to an older debate but here is what they said on the subject tonight.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/democratic-debate-coronavirus-o...