Author of Be Ready for Anything and Build a Better Pantry on a Budget online course
Yesterday we reported on everything we knew about the Wuhan Coronavirus, an outbreak in China that has reached Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Vietnam, the US, South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, and Thailand with confirmed cases.
This morning, we woke up to the news that China has quarantined three major cities with a combined population of more than 20 million people. That seems rather excessive (not to mention expensive and panic-inducing) for a virus with a proclaimed 2% death rate. The Guardian reports:
Authorities banned transport links from Wuhan, the capital of Hubei province, on Thursday, as well as the nearby central Chinese cities of Huanggang and Ezhou, suspending buses, subways, ferries and shutting the airport and train stations to outgoing passengers.
Meanwhile the state-run Beijing News said the capital had cancelled events including two well-known lunar new year temple fairs. Separately, the country’s railway operator, China State Railway Group, said passengers would be able to receive full refunds on tickets nationwide starting on Friday. (source)
Chinese authorities still report only 633 cases, 95 patients in critical condition, and 17 deaths from the virus.
Panic rises across China
The move to quarantine Wuhan, Huanggang, and Ezhou has caused panic as residents of the cities rush to purchase food and other goods before supplies run out.
In Wuhan, supermarket shelves were empty and local markets sold out of produce as residents hoarded supplies and isolated themselves at home. Petrol stations were overwhelmed as drivers stocked up on fuel, exacerbated by rumours that reserves had run out. Local residents said pharmacies had sold out of face masks.
“When I saw the news when I woke up, I felt like I was going to go crazy. This is a little too late now. The government’s measures are not enough,” said Xiao, 26, a primary schoolteacher in Wuhan, who asked not to give her full name.
Few pedestrians were out and families cancelled plans to get together for the new year holiday. Special police forces were seen patrolling railway stations. Residents and all government workers are now required to wear face masks while in public spaces. Most outbound flights from the city’s Tianhe airport were cancelled. (source)
Due to the nobody-in-nobody-out nature of the quarantine, it is unknown whether supplies will be replenished.
This certainly shows how quickly things can change. Within a span of 24 hours, the people in these regions went from a warning about a virus to a near-SHTF scenario. Those who weren’t already prepped have little chance of getting well-stocked now.
People fled to try and escape the quarantine.
The Washington Post reports that censorship of information has been evident.
In a post that was online for less than an hour, the Wuhan Health Commission admitted Thursday that it was struggling under the strain of the outbreak.
“At present, there is an obvious increase in the number of patients with fever in the city, and it is true that there are long queues and a shortage of beds in fever clinics,” the commission said.
A post from Wuhan Railway saying that 300,000 people traveled by train out of Wuhan on Wednesday, headed to every corner of the country, was also quickly deleted. (source)
According to the same report, the quarantine may not have been instituted quickly enough to stop the spread of the virus. Many people fled the cities, while others remain trapped and angry.
The central Chinese city of Wuhan pulsated with fear and anger Thursday, as 11 million people awoke to news that they were being confined to a metropolis-sized quarantine zone designed to contain a widening coronavirus outbreak.
Many people flocked to the roads to try to avoid getting caught in the quarantine. Television footage showed health workers in hazmat suits taking motorists’ temperatures as they waited at toll booths.
Others did not make it out. Hubei’s highway management authority closed multiple expressways in and around Wuhan, and Wuhan traffic police confirmed that while vehicles were allowed to come into the city, they were prohibited from going out except in special cases.
Neighboring Huanggang said it would join Wuhan’s quarantine from midnight on Thursday, shutting down transport networks and telling people they should not leave the city without special reason. Nearby Ezhou announced it would close its railway stations “to efficiently cut off channels for spreading the virus.”…In Wuhan, a city with about 3 million more people than New York, many residents were incensed at the sudden announcement of the travel restrictions on Thursday.
“I didn’t even receive a notice,” said one woman who found herself stranded at Hankou Station. She had been on her way from Henan province southwest to Sichuan and was changing trains in Wuhan when she got caught up in the suspension.
She said indignantly that she would go back to Henan. But when a reporter asked how, she conceded that she did not know.
Others interpreted the fact that the health authorities announced the travel ban at 2:30 a.m. as a sign that the outbreak was more serious than they were letting on.
“The notice shouldn’t come out so late, when everyone’s asleep,” said Jeffrey Yang, a 27-year-old Wuhan local working in the financial industry. “It makes people panic and feel like they’ve missed the opportunity to change their fate.”
…Some people resorted to extreme measures to escape the travel ban. One man who could not get a taxi to the station to catch an earlier train persuaded a food delivery driver to give him a lift on his scooter. The desperate traveler paid $72 to have the delivery man, who would usually make less than half that in a day, drop him at the station. “We were flying,” he said. (source)
Imagine being a traveler and suddenly being stranded in a city that is quarantined due to a mysterious virus.
Precautions in the US
Travelers from the Wuhan region are being routed for extra screening to Wuhan are being routed to five airports for screening: Chicago’s O’Hare, JFK, Atlanta, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. The following steps are being taken by the CDC.
- CDC established a 2019-nCoV Incident Management Structure on January 7, 2020. On January 21, 2020, CDC activated its Emergency Response System to better provide ongoing support to the 2019-nCoV response.
- On January 21, 2020, CDC again updated its interim travel health notice for this destination to provide information to people who may be traveling to Wuhan City and who may get sick. The travel notice was raised from Level 1; Practice Usual Precautions, to a Level 2: Practice Enhanced Precautions advising travelers that preliminary information suggests that older adults with underlying health conditions may be at increased risk for severe disease.
- CDC began entry screening of passengers on direct and connecting flights from Wuhan, China to the three main ports of entry in the United States on January 17, 2020. Entry screening will be expanded to airports in Atlanta and Chicago in the coming days.
- CDC issued an updated interim Health Alert Notice (HAN) Advisory to inform state and local health departments and health care providers about this outbreak on January 17, 2020.
- A CDC team has been deployed to support the ongoing investigation in the state of Washington in response to the first reported case of 2019-nCoV in the United States, including potentially tracing close contacts to determine if anyone else has become ill.
- CDC has developed a real time Reverse Transcription-Polymerase Chain Reaction (rRT-PCR) test that can diagnose 2019-nCoV. Currently, testing for this virus must take place at CDC, but in the coming days and weeks, CDC will share these tests with domestic and international partners through the agency’s International Reagent Resource. (source)
Preparing for quarantine
Those who wish to be prepared should note the speed at which quarantines were put in place in China. Don’t delay placing orders for supplies, fueling up your vehicle, and adding last-minute preps to your stockpile. You may already have many of the supplies you need, so be sure to do an inventory before panic-buying.
However, if you discover you do need supplies, get them now. If you wait until a quarantine is announced, you’ve waited too long and you’ll be out there fighting for resources with everyone else in your area.
- Read this article for more information about pandemic preparedness. Order any personal protection supplies you need.
- Order this book. It’s truly the best of its kind – Cat Ellis is a best-selling author and her book on this particular virus and how to prepare for it will not disappoint.
- Read this article about Ebola to understand how pandemics spread.
- Stock up on food. Here’s how to purchase it from the grocery store and here are the emergency buckets we recommend.
- Store water and water purification supplies.
Whatever your plan is, don’t delay taking action. Otherwise, you might find yourself in the same situation as 20 million Chinese people who were suddenly quarantined.
About Daisy
Daisy Luther is a coffee-swigging, globe-trotting blogger who writes about current events, preparedness, frugality, voluntaryism, and the pursuit of liberty on her website, The Organic Prepper. She is widely republished across alternative media and she curates all the most important news links on her aggregate site, PreppersDailyNews.com. Daisy is the best-selling author of 4 books and runs a small digital publishing company. You can find her on Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter.
Didn’t Quarantine in time? Rather obvious if it’s cropping up in other locations outside of China, that they dropped the ball on that particular control/isolation strategy. Not to be an alarmist, but a slow Official response is exactly how Pandemics get started.
You have no idea how bad things are in China. I studies Chinese medicine there in the mid 80s when it was still very communist. I know the Chinese mind about as well as any gweilo. To save face the Chinese government will cover up anything and everything. To see the degree of panic in China this morning tells me that this disease is much worse than being reported. I suggest you buy masks while still available. In HK it is very hard to find masks and a box of disposables ones are going for $100.00 USD today. In addition get colloidal silver, and better yet, get a colloidal silver generator. If you get infected and begin to cough purchase the Chinese patent medicine formula called: Clean air teaqills, to remove phlegm. This formula is available on Amazon. Stock food and water, people have yet to panic in the West, but that could change any day. Maybe this will all blow over, and maybe it will get a lot worse. We are in a Grand Solar Minimum, and with every solar minimum comes plagues and famine. Word to the wise.
Even here in the States it can be seen that Hong Kong is starting to panic. I listened to talk radio while at the gym this morning, news-talk radio 1, and about the only thing reported on in the news broadcasts was “fai-yim” (pneumonia), that 17 people had already died of it, and how it’s already affecting Hong Kong hospitals.
The Chinese government has reason to fear telling the whole truth. If people see this disease as one more reason that the communist government has lost “the mandate of heaven”, they will look for a chance to revolt. In desperation, the government is likely to involve itself in foreign military adventurism, meaning that they will invade the U.S., because to defeat the U.S. they need “boots on the ground”. They need to defeat the U.S. if they are to succeed in their other goals of taking over Taiwan, Japan, Korea and the Philippines. If they do nothing, the people will revolt.
“May you live in interesting times” as the old Englishman said.
The Chinese have no desire to revolt. I was in China, up near the Russian border in the mid 80s. People had no freedom and China was an agricultural country, and most lived a subsistence existence. Since then, China has become a global powerhouse, and stronger than the US in many ways. They are a manufacturing giant, and the people are united as never before. The US is a failing Empire, and divided to the point of civil war.The idea of China invading the US, as you postulate, is just silly. All China has to do is wait for the US to collapse. That collapse will occur during the Grand Solar Minimum.
It is not China or Russia who is waging war all over the planet, it is the US. We are no longer the good guys, regardless of who sits in the White House.
China will lose the mandate of heaven in only one way: If they are unable to feed the people during the coming cold. China has taken great steps to prevent that eventuality by procuring grain producing areas and building ghost cities in Africa to accommodate the migration out of the cold regions. Xi is forward thinking.
Putin has prepared Russia as well. He has invested billions in greenhouses and nuclear powered ice breakers.
The West is worried about LBGT and political correctness. This will hasten the collapse. Prepare while you can.
I’ve been to China within the last decade, and the people are NOT united. The communist party is universally hated, and the only thing holding the party in power is the equally hated PLA (People’s Liberation Army). The PLA is seen as violent and self-serving. The party is seen as corrupt. The traditional religions denied that there are universal standards of right and wrong, so the whole society is corrupt. The Chinese cannot be sure that the food that they eat is safe, there’s that much corruption. Because of the lack of trust, the whole society is disunited.
When the PLA invades the U.S., there will be a short time of euphoria. But if there are battlefield reverses, that euphoria will turn to rage. Rage against the party and the PLA.
The communists are not fools. They know that they need to knock the U.S. out of the war, so they’ll go for broke on an initial strike, not a gradual build up as U.S. military plans so far publicized envision. Once they’ve expended their nukes, left many of our cities smoking ruins, what then? They’ll need boots-on-the-ground to pacify the vast interior, full of furious, gun-toting veterans who know how to shoot and know what to expect in battle. If the Chinese repeat the Japanese mistake of World War II and not invade, even after absorbing a massive nuclear attack, the U.S. will regroup and invade China, a land where almost nobody is armed, so the Chinese must invade and win to prevent that possibility.
Prepping must include the possibility of nuclear war. I don’t expect the war to last a long time, but we can count on two to three months of supply disruptions. While tens of millions in the U.S. will probably die, hundreds of millions will survive. Most won’t be prepared for survival.
Yesterday, the World Health Organization decided to temporarily table a Pandemic declaration, based (AFAI can guess) on the fact that the situation is SO fluid and there is so little actual data available that they have no idea what to do next. And that would certainly be the first question following a declaration.
So far, there is a 2 percent fatality rate, same as for the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic where 50-100 Million people died. (You do the math.) That is based on known (and probably hospitalized) cases. There is no way yet to know how many actual cases, particularly mild ones, there are. And the beast is mutating. Virii mutate in the direction of acquiring more hosts; i.e., increasing transmissibility and increased damage to the host. Virii walk a fine line between making the host really sick so that the virus spreads, and actually killing the host, which is obviously counter-productive from the virus’s point of view.
The reasons that the Chinese have quarantined cities is not “an abundance of caution,” but the fact that the virus is already much worse than the Chi-gov has admitted. Releasing the announcement of a quarantine in the middle of the night was purely tactical – if people are asleep, they aren’t going to pack up and leave town, thus defeating the quarantine. The government lies to the world and they lie to their own people. Call it propaganda, restricting the Internet, deletion of news items, or whatever, you can safely bet that what you are hearing officially is either completely untrue or minimized as much as they think they can get away with. All the drama about them not wanting to relive the SARS fiasco is probably correct – what isn’t is that they haven’t changed much.
British news organs are in Hong Kong and are always tracking the Chinese truth, or lack thereof. Read the British press and CIDRAP to keep updated.
One of the companies that made the SARS vaccine is now trying to modify it so that it will be effective against this virus. Human trials might start in 3 months or so. That said, for the vaccine to be up and running and available to be distributed is estimated to take another 3 YEARS.
Meanwhile, the Great Plan is to take people’s temps as they get OFF planes. This virus has a two-week incubation rate (so far). That means that a person can be infected in a Chinese airport or restaurant, get on a plane, be checked arriving at their destination after x-hours in the air, and finally spike a fever about 10-12 days later. And we don’t even know that everyone who gets sick spikes a fever. Ebola, for example, has only a 50 percent fever rate even when showing all other critical symptoms.
I have not seen any info regarding the time period for infectivity – when it starts, how long it lasts. The guy in Washington State cannot say where or when he got infected. The CDC and Health Dept are contacting 16 people who might have been exposed to him , on the plane and after he started feeling sick, but what about all the other people before he got on the plane?
The temp check procedure is generally regarded by the medical community as whistling past the graveyard. They have to do something, even if it is basically meaningless. And taking temps is meaningless. There is a diagnostic test coming along that will be available shortly, if not already.
A lot more truth will have to come out before anyone really gets a handle on dealing with this situation.
Your job, in the meantime, is to prepare as best you can in case you wake up one morning to find yourself stuck like the folks in Wuhan.
The “Spanish Flu” had a far higher fatality rate than 2%. To kill just 50 million people (the low end of the estimate), 2.5 billion would have had to be infected. *The world population at that time was just under 2 billion.* Even a 10% fatality rate would have required 25-50% of humanity to catch the disease.
With world-wide air travel it is bound to spread. The Chinese would not quarantine 20 million people over 800 sick and 17 dead people. Stay away from crowds, if you must go to a store wear a mask and disposable gloves to push your buggy; so what if people look at you funny; don’t care. Don’t touch your face, cover any open sores/scratches, burn the mask and gloves when you get home; wash your hands, wash your hands, wash your hands!!!
i’ll put my mask and gloves in the garbage…
If a govt does some belligerent quarantine shutdown, that’s worth preparing for. But really, y’all gotta stop falling for every epidemic/pandemic BS that these people conjure up. Some people get sick, some die. Happens everyday, everywhere. The propaganda trick is to pick an opportune time and place and hype the thing to the hilt. In retrospect, every one of them in our modern era has been BS.
See here for more info: https://blog.nomorefakenews.com/2020/01/23/china-virus-epidemic-the-gong-show-on-roller-skates/
Just as the falsely labeled 1918 “Spanish Flu” was created by the Rockefeller Institute and supplied to the US Army (as well as several foreign countries), it appears that this newest pandemic was either created in England, or at least granted a patent there:
The corona virus (‘Wuhan virus’) has an English patent: number EP3172319B1,
by Martin Vrijland, 23 Jan 2020, 34 Comments
https://www.martinvrijland.nl/en/news-analyzes/the-corona-virus-wuhan-virus-has-an-English-patent-number-ep3172319b1/
–Lewis
Of course it has a patent number. Anyone who plans to work on a vaccine would have pursued a patent first. And I already told you that the company that made the SARS vaccine is doing so.
My first thought when I saw this was “If this happened here, would I be ready”? My second thought was “Yes, depending on how long the quarantine was for”.
My goal, to be ready for a quarantine lasting a month. Beyond that, we’ll probably all be dead anyway.
The Daily Mail reported this morning that the Chinese have quarantined 14 cities. I have no idea how many people that is, but it’s probably a lot. The Chinese estimate that at least 350K people in Wuhan alone are already infected and will be showing symptoms by the lst of Feb.
There are people on this blog and practically everywhere else who are poo-pooing the possible impact of the disease – low kill rate, they’re healthy, they stay away from crowds, they wash their hands, etc.
Good on ’em, but everyone needs to remember that a highly contagious disease that makes a lot of people sick enough to be hospitalized or just sends them to an Urgent Care facility, has the capability of slamming the medical care and national supply distribution systems. It doesn’t have to kill people – it just needs to take them out of the game, for even a week or two.
Just In Time delivery depends on truck drivers and trains and healthy people to unload and stock supplies. We’re not fully automated yet, and even if we were, we would still need human oversight for the system. IMHO, our already overburdened medical system simply cannot absorb hundreds of thousands of moderately sick people – and, for the moment, I don’t have any idea what the treatment protocols are.
If the bug mutates to a more damaging form, we might be talking life support for everyone who comes to an Emergency Room. Brush up on your SARS history.
British and Chinese virologists have already defied the government and gone on record saying that this leaves SARS in the dust. People who smirk that “the common cold is a coronavirus” are missing the point. In my own family we have healthy, intelligent, athletic grandchildren, 90-year old Alzheimer patients, and everything in between. Same family. Very different individuals.
CoronaVirii are the same in that they are not all the same. Some can just give you the snots for two weeks, others can drop you in your tracks. Years ago, as the vaccine was still in the developmental stage, several of my puppies came down with the doggy version of corona. By the time I realized they were sick (suddenly passing bloody stools), got them loaded into the car, and headed for the vets, they were dead. Their intestines had basically liquified in a matter of hours. It was not pretty.
Don’t underestimate the damage this virus can do to your routine. Prep for a lockdown of several weeks, maybe months, if you can.
We have been given the gift of Time. Use it wisely. My DH once asked me why I was stockpiling so much stuff that “we would never use,” and snarking that my tin hat was on too tight. I replied that if he was wrong, we could all end up seriously screwed. If I was wrong, all we had to worry about was a storeroom full of toilet paper. Something we would definitely use.
Frankly pandemic has been low on my prep list. But yesterday after reading this article I ordered the Cat Ellis book, both types of suits and some N95 masks. I have some of those masks but if this is really going to happen I decided that I needed some fresh ones, same for the gloves. I found the nitral gloves at the drug store but not the N95 masks, had to order them. Not good, it’ll take a week or 10 days for that stuff to get here.
N95s already getting scarce on Amazon….
The transportation industry is already reeling from the effects of the worldwide economy. Don’t underestimate the impact of even a “mild symptoms” pandemic.
https://wolfstreet.com/2020/01/15/us-freight-shipments-plunge-at-fastest-rate-since-2009-hit-2011-level/
Survivalblog.com has an excellent archived article on pandemic preparedness:
https://survivalblog.com/asianflu/
just want to toss out something that seems unrelated to conversation, but… lets say you have done all your preps, youre ready,etc. a simple fall/slip on ice can derail everything. i wear appropriate shoes for ice/snow, but one misstep now leaves me with right wrist in splint, already have arthritis in left thumb. know how hard it is to wipe with other hand? give it a whirl. im fortunate i have people i can call on to bring wood in for me, but i cant cut anything, really lift stuff, and its -6. as i look around at the dishes i wish i had done the night before fall… seems like minor thing, but puts new spin on trying to get prepared for additional troubles. oh, and in alaska,we are already so cut off from supply chains.
dont procrastinate on those dishes or laundry!
Isn’t it wonderful how all governments lie to their populations about nearly all numbers that really only matter to the reelection campaigns of their politicians and when it really matters, as in this case, nobody can believe the truth when it’s told?