What Next?

If you missed it, read yesterday's post of CDC warnings.

If there are mass quarantines in effect at some point, you're going to need some things.
Some of them you know, and some of them you probably haven't made provision for.

1) Water
One gal/person/day, minimum.
If you're planning on city water continuing to flow, well...best of luck there.
Hope ain't a plan.
Three days without water, and your kidneys will begin to shut down.

2) Food
Figure out a menu for a month. Focus on variety, and calories, ideally of easy-to-prepare food.
Now get to where you have six to twelve months' worth on hand.
If you're planning on the .Gov handing out MREs, well...best of luck there.
Hope ain't a plan.

3) Rx and OTC meds.
Your pharmacy probably won't be open, and you may need to care for yourself and/or family members.
For any conditions you already have, and possibly also Kung Flu.

4) Lights and Heat/AC
If water stops, what makes you think power, gas, etc. will still continue?

5) Banking and cash reserves
Your landlord or bank is still going to expect you to make rent/mortgage payments.
Ditto for property taxes. Trash or utility bills. Any other regular payments.
Whether banks are still operational is an open question. Options, and a cash reserve float, would be prudent. Doubly so if this becomes you not going to work for an extended period, non-voluntarily.

6) Your home version of 9-1-1.
Protection from stupid people, because you've got something they didn't plan to have.
I don't care if, for you, that's a big dog, a baseball bat, a loaded .45, or prayer beads.
People are stupid now, pre-panic.
Think hurricane, that lasts months, here.
Imagine your stupidest near-neighbor, two months into being hungry every day.

Hopefully, nothing gets this bad, or lasts for very long.
But it might. And stay-at-home quarantines are what CDC is talking about when they talk about "community mitigation measures" and "tele-schooling, and tele-working".
And yet again, hope ain't a plan.

Notice I said nothing about isolation gear.
That's because
a) you won't have enough, ever
b) playing outside in a pandemic is about as bright as playing on the highway
c) the results are likely to be rather similar
Stay inside means stay inside.
If you live on acreage, don't leave the property. No one else in or out.)
Going out and about is simply rolling the dice with catching something you didn't have, until you got stupid.
Don't do that.

Someone really smart would start doing an inventory, and see where they're short, then start backfilling those holes in their abilities. That way you're the solution, and not part of the problem, if/when this becomes a thing.

And if it never does, nothing on this list goes bad overnight, and solves 99% of your problems in every other disaster/problem you're likely to face.

It's also too late to shop when they announce things are shutting down now, like they will, with barricades and check points already up.

So decide whether you'd rather be a month early, or five minutes too late.
You only get one chance to make that choice, and it's now.

Quarantine Math (For Common Core Grads)

Okay, kids, some folks don't get this yet (no finger-pointing) so let's break it down.

If you have, e.g., 3711 people on a cruise ship, and you get 20 new cases of corona virus per day, because the ship is essentially one common cootie-pit of shared air- and water-handling (not to mention food service), within 90 days, half the ship is infected. Since the infection curve will be bell-curve shaped to that point, shortly after that, everyone on the ship has it. (Attention, Math Nerds and Purists: Relax. Don't quibble over a difference without a distinction, nor get stuck on stupid. We're doing napkin math here, not quadratic equations.) If the disease course lasts 10 days, and it incubates for up to 14 days, that's a nominal 114-day quarantine, to wait it out after the last person is infected, with 3711 infected, and 111+ dead. (In the case of the MV Death Princess, where most of the passengers are aged over 60, the death toll will probably run into the multiple hundreds if they let everyone get it).

Conversely, if you brilliantly take everyone off  the motherf**king ship, and house them separately in individual or couples' quarters at dockside, you get the initial cases, no additional ones, and you do a quarantine of more like 24 days, instead of 114. And you can pull the infected into secure treatment areas immediately, so they don't spread it any further, once they're identified. With a death toll in the single digits.

Other than tentage, and temporary facilities, the cost is exactly the same per day, so you save 80 days' quarantine costs. Oh, and you also save hundreds of lives. Which, at least in countries that have never used live women and children for bayonet practice, is generally considered the whole point of the exercise.

During which time you can also have hazmat crews laboriously and excruciatingly decon the whole damned ship, while the locus of actual virus is still relatively small.

The nominal cost for Option A is
3711 x $2M@ for dead, infected, pain and suffering, mental cruelty, plus the cost to scrap the MV Death Princess out at sea, and they went for about $400M when they were built twenty years ago.

Call it US$8Billion, round numbers.
That bankrupts Carnival Lines, and cripples Lloyd's of London and twenty lesser insurance carriers by June, and pretty much cancels ocean cruises worldwide until further notice.

Which is another $126B economic impact, including $41B in salaries and jobs worldwide.
 
Double that $8B to Japan's treasury, for the role of the Japanese government in fomenting the disaster in the first place. After they covered themselves in glory with Fukushima.

This is on a par with what happened to the air travel and hotel industries after 9/11.

Or, they could stop being fuckwits, forthwith.

The nominal cost for Option B is
$100M, give or take, all in, for the miniscule number of deaths, minimal suffering, and decon of the ship.

So, for the clever Clydes out there, if you're the head of Carnival Cruise Lines, and/or the Japanese Minister for Not Being A Death Camp Guard Fuck-up, which bill would you rather pay?

Nota bene: The International Court in the Hague is awaiting your decision, and the navies of China, India, and several NATO countries (none of them with fond memories of your earlier dealings with them) are soon to be steaming towards Yokohama, in case you need help pulling your head out of your ass.

Tick, tick, tick...

Paging Dr. Mengele...

From SiG's blog:
Quarantined Cruise Ship In Japan May Now Be The Best Place To Study The Corona Virus.
 

It's only "best" in the sense that you're going to kill a given number of persons, to a metaphysical certainty, most of them needlessly.

The castaways are only as smart as Gilligan, and those 3711 people, passengers and crew, are only as safe as the stupidest person on the ship, because that's the guy who's the 21st century Typhoid Mary, cheerfully spreading infection hither and yon. In this case, Gilligan is a Japanese quarantine worker:

"It's reported that the Japanese quarantine worker wasn't wearing highly protective clothing for high biosafety level areas, just wearing a mask and gloves.  He was handing out questionnaires and checking the health of passengers and crew members."

Top. Men.

(Bonus Question for Japan's PTB: How many Japanese citizens did Gilligan unknowingly expose and/or infect after he left the ship, and before anyone knew he'd contracted the virus? Get back to us in 14 days, quarantine geniusii. The ironic humor, it kills us.)

That Gilligan Factor may also include the ship's air handling system and/or plumbing, which isn't segregated, nor sterile, so keeping everyone in the rooms of a steel ship is tantamount to having the sickest of them coughing on everyone, 24/7/365, and will also probably necessitate the total write-off of the ship to Princess Lines as a permanently colonized Plague Ship.

It is a near-certainty that no maritime insurer will ever cover it to set sail again, even if they burned it out from stem to stern. (Would you sail on it, or drink the water from the pipes? Sh'yeah, like hell you would.)

At the end of the day, the line, plus the Japanese government, will be liable for billion$ in damages from survivors and heirs' estates, for literally killing people, but given Japanese history regarding the Rape Of Nanking, that shouldn't be too troubling to leadership in Tokyo. More like reliving the good old days of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.

Basic humanity would dictate that they move people off the ship into individual quarantine tents in the adjacent parking lot, and strictly segregate all their functions, including food and toileting. Doing it like they're doing is going to kill greater numbers, needlessly, who were initially uninfected.

Including crew members.

This is ghoul practice, not quarantine, but it accords with the millennia-long eastern tradition of regarding individuals as less worthy than cattle.

If there were a war on, this would be a war crime. As it is, it's a crime against humanity. With which, yet again, the Japanese have some wee history of familiarity.

Chaos Brings Opportunity...And Chaos

So, as I said I would at the end of that post, I went through my E.R.'s supplies this past weekend, and made a list of items that we source from China. The list is esoteric, and very inside-baseball, unless you're in the trade. I sent it, in a memo, up the chain, so that hopefully administration will source alternative vendors for items which may become Chinesium Unobtanium any day now, until further notice, because between 50-500M Chinese are no longer going to work in the toy factories that make the things I use to make sick people well. So forget the item list, but take away this TL;DR note:

Of 54 major items, 43% (23 items) are sourced from, assembled in, or produced in China. That's nearly half of everything we use, 24/7/365, forever.

Many of them might be sourced elsewhere (and I hope to hell we do it before it bites us in the ass); but many cannot be. The lack of some will get you or someone like you killed if I haven't got it.

Multiply that times nearly 5600 U. S. hospitals, and countless clinics and doctor's offices, just for healthcare, nationwide, and you can begin to grasp the magnitude of this problem.

Then, extrapolate that to the entire economy.

Then go from second-order effects, to third order effects.

WallyMart and Horror Freight live and die on importing literal metric mega-fucktons of cheap Chinese sh*t, to exist.

So when that pipeline dries up, possibly overnight, you tell me:

What does stock in WalMart or Harbor Freight open at on the market the day after they can't get their goods?

What about fourth-order effects?

Who gets laid off as a direct result?

What happens to the economy, not only for the family of Joe the Greeter and Sally the Checker, but for the folks whose groceries they don't buy, the movies they don't see, the gasoline they don't need to drive to work at the job they don't have any more, and the state and federal welfare dole they swell?

Because some little sh*theads, in some sh*thole, had to have batburgers last year, the economy, perhaps of the world, takes a punch right in the crotch.
And the rot of fiatbux means the house of cards could all come tumbling down.
Possibly in a matter of weeks. Or months. Or hours. Or never.

No one has any effing idea whether or not, nor how fast and far, such a collapse could go.

And it doesn't even require even one single person more outside China to get corona virus, (or whatever-in-hell this is).

That's enough rose-colored glasses for one morning.
Think it over yourself.

And have a happy day.

Rampant Speculation, And Unavoidable Realities

Borepatch notes we will see how bad this virus outbreak is in about a month.

Au contraire.

Best Case:
Those 5 U. S. cases squeaked in, and that's it.

It's happened here before. It might happen again.

Middle Case:
It's simply ordinary corona virus, with a 3% death rate (on average), and it spreads apace, like they do. 

Actually, we'll know sooner than a month. Those 5 initial U.S. cases started cropping up here about 14 days ago, so we'll start seeing second-tier infections soon, if there are any. And if both our governmental overlords, and the ABCNNBCBS media, decides we should know about it. If we get 10-20 new cases shortly, we're probably screwed.

At that rate, absent any other mitigating factors, it's nationwide by around Christmas this year, and perhaps far sooner.
(2-14 day incubation, unknown transmissibility during latent phase, r0 of 2-4)
And even with simple corona virus, that's potentially up to 9M dead by then.
(3% of 300M or so)

Pretty grim, all in all. If you get the short straw.
Not so much if you're in the other 97%.
Sorry, but there it is.

Worst Case:It's some bio-engineered frankenvirus, with who-knows what lethality, r-naught, and incubation time.

OTOH, if it's some bioengineered frankenvirus, all bets are off, with who-knows-how-many casualties, nor what rate of transmission.

And what's coming out of China - every bit of it - is still unadulterated bullsh..., um, rose fertilizer.

You won't know if it's middle- or worst-case here until after it explodes here, and if it gets accurate media coverage. (Bear in mind that when Ebola coverage was freaking people here out in 2014, Obozo asked the MSM to stop talking about it, and they left skid marks and fell all over themselves to shut up until further notice. Learn a lesson there. Even if their regard and professional [sic] relationship is different with Orange Man, they didn't suddenly get an honestly transplant, nor a booster shot of competence.)

Anyone telling you different about this, at any of those plot points, is lying to you if their lips are moving, until further notice. The truth as yet is still BVR, out in the fog.
 

And other than hunkering down and self-quarantining in time, there's still nothing else you can do about it, except the basic infection control procedures previously covered.

 

{Nota bene, random fucktards, no one, least of all this site, is ringing the panic bell. You'll ignore this obvious truth, but that's why you're fucktards.}

The one certainty is that the kabuki-theatre temperature screening at the airport, of a virus that can incubate for 2-14 days, guarantees that more latent cases could arrive here every day, and if that happens, we won't know until after it's too late.

And Lest Ye Forget:
Second-Order Effects

For sheer grins, this weekend, I'm going to compile a list of items used every day in my E.R. that are sourced from China.