Survival and Emergency Preparedness

Isn't this one suppose to be airborne?

Interesting little article and what caught my attention is how quickly the FBI wants it filled:

The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation has ordered $40,000 of hand sanitizer and face masks “in case the coronavirus becomes a pandemic in the United States,” according to the acquisition document. The FBI’s “pandemic preparedness” supply order includes face masks from manufacturer 3M and disinfectants, including hand sanitizer, from PDI Healthcare, the document said. In its purchase order, the FBI said it needs to have those items on hand if the coronavirus, or COVID-19, spreads widely throughout the U.S. The masks and disinfectants “are to be stored throughout the country for distribution in the event of a declared pandemic,” according to the document, which was signed Friday and gave the companies a week to fulfill the order.

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/20/coronav ... dates.html

I wonder how much hand sanitizer and masks 40K will buy?

Given that the October 31, 2014 census of the FBI was 35,104 employees, it works out to a dollar per employee. I would assume that the upper management which never sees the field will make sure that the employees on mahogany row are well supplied.

I don’t know if it is real or not, I don’t understand Chinese and not able to get the words into a translator, so I will have to take others that are saying it is from Wuhan.

This is a city of 11 million, can you imagine New York sounding like that?

https://youtu.be/opFCAWZHpzg

This is the type of thing you see in the horror movies right before the zombies come crashing into your home.

Federal health officials on Tuesday warned schools and businesses to prepare for a nationwide spread of the novel coronavirus that has killed more than 2,700 people worldwide.
“You should ask your children’s schools about their plans for school dismissals or school closures. Ask about plans for teleschool,” Nancy Messonnier, a CDC director, said during a press briefing on Tuesday. “I contacted my local school superintendent this morning with exactly those questions.”
As of Tuesday, there are more than 80,000 confirmed cases worldwide of the COVID-19 illness — marked by fever, coughing, difficulty breathing, and pneumonia — with the great majority in China. However, outbreaks in Iran, Italy, and South Korea in the last week have sparked concerns about a global pandemic of the respiratory virus, for which there is no native immunity and no current vaccine.
Fears of a global pandemic triggered a stock market drop, tweets from President Donald Trump, and a White House request for $2.5 billion in emergency response funds from Congress, described as “long overdue and completely inadequate” by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California.
“Ultimately, we expect we will see community spread in this country,” Messonnier said. “It’s not so much a question of if this will happen anymore, but rather more a question of exactly when this will happen and how many people in this country will have severe illness.”
As of Tuesday, there are 14 confirmed cases of people in the US with the virus, as well as 43 cases of people repatriated to the US from the Chinese province of Hubei and the Diamond Princess cruise ship, Messonnier said.
The CDC has indicated that the national response to a widespread coronavirus outbreak would follow a 2017 plan for a similarly novel flu pandemic, triggering school and business closures, travel restrictions on outbreak regions, and quarantines of infected patients.
Beyond the CDC, 12 states and localities in the US currently have the capability to test for the virus. After the CDC recently sent faulty testing kits nationwide, it is now working to fix the problem. Messonnier declined to say when the updated kits will be ready.
At a World Health Organization press conference also on Tuesday, Bruce Aylward, who led the COVID-19 international experts mission to China, presented results from the team’s inspection of the country's response to the outbreak. “It’s the unanimous assessment of the team that they have changed the course of this outbreak,” Aylward said, citing the decline in new cases in China. Aylward argued that China’s aggressive response to containing the coronavirus led to “hundreds of thousands” of people in the country avoiding getting sick.
However, China’s containment of the virus has not kept the illness from spreading to 35 countries. Most seriously, the specter of an uncontrolled spread in Iran arose over the weekend, with at least 95 cases reported there and 16 deaths. On Tuesday, the head of Iran’s anti-coronavirus task force tested positive for the virus, a day after appearing visibly sick during a news conference.
Some epidemiologists, including David Fisman of the University of Toronto, have suggested that a great many more cases may be in Iran, based on cases spreading across the Middle East to Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Lebanon.
“To date, our containment strategies have been largely successful — as a result, we have very few cases in the United States and no spread in the community,” Messonnier said. “But as more and more countries experience community spread, successful containment at our borders becomes harder and harder.”

Good luck to all. Members of this forum are ahead of the preparation curve of other citizens.

I expect that I will get sick and recover. In the meantime, the reality is that I will be helping relatives to some extend. I hope that my preparations will allow me to recover in quiet.

I have a presentation that I have to complete today on the COVID-19 and discuss the response.

Nothing like being put on the spot with a topic that the experts can't even agree on.

Just remember that experts built the Titanic and an amateur built the ark