I had originally planned to write about the bigotry of Stephen King and some other authors along with a miserable trope in USA channel movies, but that will have to be later this week. Instead, I need to cover a more important subject.
There is a lot being written about the coronavirus that is raging across China, and headed world-wide. A coronavirus is any of a family of single-stranded RNA viruses that has a lipid envelope with club-shaped projections. Some of the family don’t really have a negative affect on humans; but, some strains do. While a suspect for some cases of gastroenteritis, the ones that do effect humans do so through the respiratory system. The common cold is a coronavirus.
Unfortunately, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) are both of the coronavirus family. The strain currently spreading from Wuhan (2019-nCoV) is a new strain and is similar to SARS.
It can infect human lungs as easily as the common cold, it can be passed person-to-person (patient to caregiver is confirmed), and while England has issued some strong precautions, at least one of the cases in the US is being treated by telemedicine as much as possible.
Also understand that the Chinese government has lied about this disease from the start, and there is no reason for them to stop. They are severely censoring information as fast and as hard as they can. They are taking the virus seriously, but the question is will their efforts be effective. As a bit of background (hope to add more later), when the Chinese government was admitting to 50 cases, outside experts pegged it at 1,700. That was on the 18th, and there are reports suggesting that while there are roughly 3,000 confirmed cases, that the actual infection rate is in excess of 90,000 people.
Is there cause to panic? No. Is there cause to be concerned? Yes. A good resource for keeping up with the current outbreak is here.
What can and should you do? Well, I think having 3-7 days of food and water is a good start for anything. I try to keep that and a bit more (so I have a month’s supply of coffee, don’t judge my addictions) on hand at all times. For other reasons, I’ve been upping some of my preparations. If you don’t have a 3-7 day supply of food, water, medicines, supplements, and basic supplies, it is good to get and maintain them for general preparedness purposes.
If this does turn into a true global pandemic similar to the 1918 Spanish Flu (or worse), then you are talking a different level of preparedness. For that you will need 4-6 weeks worth of water, food, and supplies.
I will discuss practical preparedness, as well as preparedness for a pandemic more in the days ahead.