Breaking a promise, but I'm lazy, and after taking the time to lay this out on his site, I'm posting it here.
Zero has posted a frightening link to future events in Congo with regard to Ebola.
And the title asks: The Next Plague Is Coming. Is America Ready?
If you're looking at me, just like 2014, that answer is a resounding "Hell, NO!"
We have learned nothing from 2014.
Nothing whatsoever.
Now a word from Reality:
1) Ebola is spread by coughs and sneezes.
That’s droplet precautions, not contact.
2) Coughed and sneezed particles of virus-laden material travel 25 feet, and are suspended in air up to ten minutes.
3) The minimum number of Ebola viruses sufficient to ensure infection is one.
4) In the current DRC Ebola outbreak, 50% of victims show no sign of fever once infected.
5) The only symptom airport screeners over there and over here look at, to screen out potential Ebola victims from travelling, is (wait for it)…fever.
6) There are 11…ELEVEN…total BL-IV hospital beds to properly care for Ebola victims, in all of North America, and three of those are permanently reserved for military victims near the US chem/bio research labs.
7) In 2014, we had filled 10 of those beds at once with the victims of Ebola we were treating, including the two ICU nurses from Dallas from one case of Ebola in the wild, in the US.
IOW, we were two patients from being Liberia then, or Kivu province now.
8) Once it hits mainstream US hospitals, society here is functionally over, in about a week.
So, you do the math on how well airport screeners (known worldwide for looking the other way for a sawbuck) and possessed of a 6th-grade education on average, and hazy acquaintance with scientific thought or even math above ten without taking their shoes off, will do at protecting the First World from the pestilence of the Turd World.
Ain’t. Gonna. Happen.
Afterwards, you’ll probably want to review Zero’s posts and links on the local LDS cannery nearest you, and start stocking up on buckets, and water barrels, along with the sort of canned goods that come in square olive drab metal cans.
The question isn’t whether such pestilence is coming here, it’s simply a matter of when.
After that, YOYO.
God help you if you’ve ignored preparations for such an eventuality, at that point.
Nothing else will.
{Where I’m working currently, they’re doing decon drills, which, exactly like the ones the .mil had me do in the 1980s, mainly serve to underline that with chem/bio threats, in any serious outbreak, the first people infected are going to die, quickly, and the most prudent response besides running for the hills and living behind concertina wire for weeks to months (if you can manage that, because you should), will be to bend over, grab your ankles, and kiss your @$$ goodbye.}
I'm not kidding.
I'm not exaggerating.
I don't know how to put this any more plainly.
You will see this material again.
Failure to plan is planning to fail.
Best Wishes.
32 comments:
How do you feel about being in the middle of 25 million people down there in So Cal when the balloon eventually goes up? When I lived in the OC I concluded the entire region was toast unless you could somehow time it right to get out of Dodge (e.g. at least to the Springs or Barstow) before the roads became impassable. The timing of all of these SHTF events is the most difficult one for me; in the LA region I'm not sure even perfect timing is going to save too many people.
It isn't like I'm licking their hands every day.
One infected person 5 ft. away in BFE is just as deadly, or deadlier, than 25M people I won't be dealing with up-close if things get sporty.
It's the last 10 yards that matters, no matter where you are.
Zero contact works anywhere.
It's just easier to enforce in secluded areas, but if I could live and make a living far from the madding crowd, rest assured I would.
I visited a sick friend at Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas (the Ebola one, IIRC) about three months after the "accident."
It is staffed BY the Third World.
DOD needs to demonstrably step up its game on vaccine stockpile, cordon sanitaire and hot zone decontamination. BS-IV isolation game is a no win.
Thanks for all your insight on this Aesop.
If/when Ebola comes to the US, will the ring strategy of vaccination be as successful at heading it off as it has been in the Congo? From my untrained perspective, it appears the vaccine (or something) is keeping this outbreak from being as bad as 2014.
What is a BL-IV bed? Neither Duck Duck Go nor Google will tell me. How long will the virus live on a hard surface?
Makes be begin to wonder what the news will be like . . . I imagine,
"Happy, nothing's wrong."
"Happy, wash your hands."
"Happy, over soon."
Then:
"Stay in your homes."
Then . . . nothing good.
Best to be where you want to be when news is still "Happy."
I wonder if the vaccine is production limited or distribution limited. If the latter, is it available? In either case, I also wonder how many doses are already reserved for our "superiors".
Not being funny but can we lock down the borders already? This is getting out of hand
My wife and I are preparing for this, by stockpiling food and water for both of us, and our five cats. We live in a suburb of Cincinnati that is getting more diverse than we would like, but we own the property.
I work on the road as a contract engineer; right now I'm working only about 350 miles from home. This contract ends in July, and after that I may go home until this is over, or go on the road for the next assignment.
Three questions for you or your more informed commentators:
Do you think this will be the end of Western Civilization, and the United States itself? The USA that I grew up with is gone, but I have some abiding love for what the flag stood for.
Do you think power and other utilities will stay on throughout the course of the plague?
When will it be time to hunker down and not go out at all?
Not so much as a specific date, but more a question as to the signs that the plague is in our midst. My wife wonders if the plague has actually hit the US yet, and the feds are covering it up. I don't think so, but given the stupidity and frankly, evil nature of much of our ruling class, it is possible.
I've given up trying to raise the alarm at my client. My co-workers are smart, but not interested in anything but what is on ESPN or in Game of Thrones.
I'm renting an apartment near a major medical district in Grand Rapids, MI, and I talk with some medical staff who live nearby. Ebola doesn't seem to be on their radar at all, and I plan on being far away from here when Ebola comes a'courting.
@Don:
Back in the dad when I wasn't working out of my basement - love the commute - I talked about economic collapse. Nobody thought it could happen. Bring Ebola up, same. EMP, same.
Yet you and I, and Aesop, and most readers here, know that if the SHTF for whatever reason, who are they going to remember has preps?
Your going to do what you want to do so why ask questions...Why I say that is because of your choices of where you live at the present time when there has been a ton of info out there of why not to be in the burbs...
@onthe beach,
BL-IV is an abbreviation for Bio-Level 4, the highest or maybe second highest level of biological security in medical treatment. The security levels are designed to keep the disease from being spread to medical personnel and visitors (BL-IV doesn't have visitors.)
@Don,
the best time to bunker down with no inter-personal contact is about two weeks before people start exhibiting symptoms in your area. That makes it difficult to determine. That's why those thinking about it are worried, including me.
As for your question about effects on utilities and Western Civilization, if the utility workers stay home (for the same concerns as you, not getting infected or maybe Bringing it to their families) then the power, gas, water, sewer, etc., will eventually go down. Regarding civilization 's prospects, review Aesop's notes elsewhere about Ebola being 75-80% fatal (or higher) and the survivors being potentially infectious for the remainder of their lives and after death.
Draw your own conclusions. Prepare now.
Hey Brother just want to let you know if the utility people stay home within a day all hell will break loose...The ECC is constantly manipulating the grid because of all the green power(which I've stated before the more green we go the more vulnerable we are) so when no one is there to do that things will go kaput rather quickly...
In order:
>Ring vaccination is a great strategy for a foot-propelled, tribal-based society, where one person may have 5-20 contacts.
In the U.S., where one trip to the mall of movie theatre would generate 500-5000 random contacts, it has no chance of success.
> BL-IV is Biohazard Level 4, the highest level of biohazard protection, for virulent and lethal pathogens with no way to stop them.
Like Ebola virus.
And as I said, we have staff and space for exactly 11 beds to handle people infected with BL-IV pathogens, nationwide. (Canada and Mexico have 0 beds each. South America is probably the same.)
At patient #12, Ebola is now being treated by the local hospital. Ask the citizens of Dallas who've lived there for 6 years or more how that works out in practice, rather than in theory. I think the final tally was up to 10,000 or so potential infectees. From one actual case.
> I have no idea what Merck's production capabilities for vaccine are, but probably not even enough for a fraction of the 300M doses the U.S alone would need.
And TPTB need no vaccine if they already have quarantine compounds reserved for them.
> If this plague gets here, nothing is staying on. Dallas Health Presbyterian Hospital, all 898 beds, was a ghost town after it was known they had two Ebola cases in residence. The entire ER and ICU staff threatened to quit en masse if the hospital wasn't closed and locked.
Management was whipped right then, and they knew it, so they closed down.
They nearly went bankrupt.
For two cases.
It took months before they could find anyone, anywhere who could and would handle the two tons of biohazardous waste generated in caring for two people, for a couple of weeks before they were moved.
That will be every business, everywhere when Ebola comes to town.
No deliveries.
No business.
No banks.
No gasoline.
No food.
No power.
No water.
No sanitation.
No garbage collection.
No economy.
No medical care.
No pharmacies, or post office, radio, TV, or anything else.
That's a societal collapse event, in short order, followed by probably total breakdown of order and governance.
Cops and fire and EMS isn't coming to work, neither is anybody at city hall or the state capitol, and half the Notional Guard would be AWOL in a week.
When I wrote YOYO ("You're On your Own") I meant it.
Concertina wire is nice.
So is food and water. And ammo.
But can you handle your own poop and pee for even 6 months, unassisted, with no power or water? Do you have that much toilet paper, hand soap, razor blades, and everything else?
Can you clean your clothes for six months or a year all on your own?
What are your medical needs?
Can you gather information and broadcast news beyond just your own line of sight, or CB radio range?
Who's your back-up plan when you're sleeping?
Got tribe?
MT is looking better and better isn't it😉
Thanks for the clarification on ring vaccination.
Hello Aesop,
Writing from the Boston area (not your favorite part of the U.S., I know) and I just had some dealings with medical people here. They all were aware of Ebola and were concerned. I was shocked because they are the only group of people I know who had this attitude. I mentioned that Ebola would put our lights out literally (as in no electric grid after a few days) and that preps should be in place yesterday, particularly food and clean water. The public health system here is usually excellent but there is no Ebola vaccine to be had even by the doctors.
Regarding other preps besides the obvious e.g. firearms, ammo, ammo, ammo, water, food etc. I believe short wave radio and CB will dominate comms for a while if Ebola comes to visit. SW radios can be had cheaply now and licensing is not difficult either, no Morse Code for the basic license. The internet will fail if there is an Ebola crisis which will stop cell phones. AM radio operated by DHS will probably end up being the dominant means of domestic information.
Perhaps the President should issue an executive order allocating funds for emergency vaccine production and distribution. Better to get people worried now than dead later from something that can be mitigated.
Utilities
Utilities can fail, see Venezuela, but they are fairly resilient all the same, see, well Venezuela,
Gas electricity stations and gas drill sites are both fairly isolated, or isolatable, and can, with political will, be militarised.
The government says show up to work with your family in this defended, supplied, compound, or we'll pick your family up and dump them in the hottest hot zone we can find.
Go in to the hot zone and fix this substation, probably no, but most of the grid can stay up.
Fort Homestead
Spanish Flu started in 1918, spread to every corner of the world, from the pacific islands, Alaskan wilderness and Russian Steppes, to the largest of cities.
Outbreaks raged and abated, raged and abated, for three, whole, years.
You might be able to avoid the worst of it,
Government under widespread Ebola will probably collapse in about a month.
Maybe three.
Dallas, here, in 2014, managed to double active Ebola cases in exactly 21 days, using the best and brightest and most advanced medical technology available.
And we're just as unprepared now as we were then, and twice as stupid.
Even with a vaccine.
The government won't be issuing orders to anyone.
(Except "Stay indoors, UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE.")
See how well that works out when everyone starts to run out of water and food. Or winter comes, and there's no heat.
Our whole system is predicated on everything and everyone working with minimum disruption. It is not a resilient system, nor was ever designed to be such.
People in a crisis issuing orders at gunpoint like that aren't a government, they are a mob with guns, and they'll find out in about 4 seconds they have no monopoly on that, and then the range is open in both directions.
Elections and nominations at that point will resemble this kind:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjEcOkwV2MU
Think the problem through.
Ebola becomes widespread.
And then...
And then...
And then...
It's liable to be the nearest thing to the Black Death anyone's seen in centuries.
And we're not a rural, self-sufficient society.
We depend on electrons, and ATMs, and power, and railroads and truck drivers, and gasoline and specialization.
That will be dominoes knocking each other over.
Like Katrina and the Joplin F5 and the Northridge Earthquake and the Paradise Fire everywhere simultaneously, and rippling outwards in all directions, then carroming back again.
One guy at the mall gets it, and then everyone working there is quarantined.
Then the mall is shut down.
Then the school.
Then the bus company.
Then the bank.
Then every bank.
On and on and on.
One victim on one plane becomes 300 victims in 300 towns and cities.
Kids to parents, and parents to their kids.
The stock market is suspended, and shut down indefinitely.
Economies worldwide go into freefall.
This stuff is how wars start.
And civilizations collapse.
It took a couple of centuries, in a far more travel-limited society, for plague to burn out in Europe, and let the Renaissance kick off.
After it wiped out millions, and killing perhaps 1/3rd of the Western world.
This will be faster, more virulent, and more destructive, necessarily.
And ain't no one going to live to be 150 just to outlast it.
And we haven't even talked about what happens when the virus becomes endemic to native species on every continent: bats, rats, and cats.
Government?
Man, if this really gets ahold here, you'll be lucky to find a village in a year, let alone a state or country.
I follow these updates regularly.
I've warned those closest to me.
I have tried warning a few others...most don't want to hear it, and one of whom responded that this is "nothing", "it's a total sham to divert our attention from what's really going on" and Ebola is a "genetically engineered disease that isn't anywhere near as lethal as the media is saying, the CDC has patented it, yada, yada, yada" - I tuned out pdq.
Needless to say that particular individual and associates won't get closer to me and mine than 100 meters. When presented with the question, how can the media be using this distract us and divert our attention when said media is barely mentioning it, if at all, the response was.... When I made the statement that engineered or not is irrelevant, it's in the wild, it's a commercial plane flight away, and it won't discriminate...said individual actually got quite haughty with me, essentially telling me I'm the idiot.
I'm done warning folks (again save those closest to me, e.g. direct kin). We might not be able to fix stupid, but there's damn well a permanent fix for it coming, and it will fix stupid double-quick.
Government. I say odds are low we will know when it first gets here.
No one wants to hear any SHTF scenario. Does not compute for them from Hurricane to earthquake to fire or Ebola. Talking to most is like trying to piss up a rope.
The persistent question I have is why has it not happened already. When it got here last event I thought the balloon was going up. Yet even with the person flying to Ohio and the other running around Maine it did not happen. Now we have months of infection in a chaotic war zone and no one seems to have squirted out into the rest of the world. I know that the health workers are performing a heroic task but I have thought that no one can always be that good every day always. But breakouts can and do happen I just am beginning to believe that there has to be some other happening that will be the catalyst for the horizon event (like African Swine Fever).
That being said even with a visit from deaths messenger the breakdown will happen slower that one might imagine. Why, because we have heroes in our midst. The firemen who ran up the stairs at the World Trade Center. The people who worked the poison pile and all others like those at Northridge or the civilian navy that forms at floods. So many will work even when it is time to go, oldsters like me will send the young to seek shelter. Why because I still plant trees I will never see mature. I am no ones hero but I do see a need. I am surrounded by many who feel the same and we know we are not the survivors.
If the grid goes down only the prepared will survive as all bets are off as there will be few with the skill to put it back into production for a long time.
"Why, because we have heroes in our midst. The firemen who ran up the stairs at the World Trade Center. The people who worked the poison pile and all others like those at Northridge or the civilian navy that forms at floods. So many will work even when it is time to go, oldsters like me will send the young to seek shelter. Why because I still plant trees I will never see mature."
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Thank you, Goose. There are a lot of people like you out there - it is endemic to the species, else we would never have survived all of the challenges that humans have faced over the last 50,000 or more years. At 58, I can still hope to sit in the shade of seedlings that I plant, and I have 2 teenagers...but I can also see the time in the not terribly distant future when I would feel like I've had my go at it, and understand that it is time to do what is necessary so that civilization can still go on.
That all said, let's hope that we don't actually have to deal with an Ebola plague, a massive EMP, a financial system breakdown, etc. Whether by design, or by pure, dumb luck, maybe everyone reading this will die of old age in their beds...but, of course, hope is not a plan. I like the idea of using the wetware that put us on top of the food chain to keep us there, largely intact and capable of becoming a star-faring civilization.
Some interesting links courtesy of your tax dollars....
With rising cases and dwindling stockpiles, WHO suggests alternative Ebola vaccination strategies
Stephanie Soucheray | News Reporter | CIDRAP News
| May 07, 2019
Today SAGE, the World Health Organization's Strategic Advisory Group of Experts, released new guidelines to address several growing concerns about vaccination strategies currently being used in Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) Ebola outbreak.
Despite vaccinating more than 111,000 people with Merck's rVSV-ZEBOV, a highly protective unlicensed Ebola vaccine, the outbreak has worsened dramatically in the last month due to violent attacks and a communication breakdown between community members and response workers.
And cases with no connection to an ongoing transmission chain are increasingly being diagnosed.
http://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2019/05/rising-cases-and-dwindling-stockpiles-who-suggests-alternative-ebola
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"Each one agreed: A disaster is unfolding.
“The numbers in the last month have been horrifying,” said Dr. Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome Trust, a major funder of the Ebola response. “It’s on a knife edge. I’m not sure how else to describe it, really.”
The World Health Organization is doing scenario mapping trying to figure out just how bad this outbreak might become. But Dr. Mike Ryan, executive director of the emergencies program, won’t share what they see as they look at their models. “That’s for planning purposes, not for speculation,” Ryan insisted in an interview with STAT on Monday
The statistics are grim: Double-digit daily increases in the case count are now the norm. Most new cases are people who never hit the radar of the teams searching for those who have been exposed to the virus, so they were never offered the experimental Ebola vaccine being used to try to contain the outbreak. Treatment centers are under armed guard, protecting health workers but discouraging people with Ebola from seeking their care, people familiar with the situation say.
Ebola treatment centers and roadside checkpoints have been torched; response workers have been beaten. On April 19, Dr. Richard Mouzoko, an epidemiologist from Cameroon working for the World Health Organization, was murdered when gunmen burst into a meeting he was leading."
https://www.statnews.com/2019/05/07/ebola-outbreak-escalate-violence/
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"Stopping the Gaps in Epidemic Preparedness"
Several life-threatening viruses have been identified for the first time in the 21st century, including the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) coronaviruses. An association between Zika virus infection during pregnancy and microcephaly came to light only in 2015. Once seemingly confined by public health measures to sporadic episodes in rural areas, Ebola virus disease broke free in 2014, reaching urban centers and killing more than 11,000 people. Like all epidemics, it drew resources away from other critical health care needs and left a legacy of distrust and disconnection."
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp1902683
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and a couple more
https://www.cgdev.org/publication/struggling-scale-ebolas-lessons-next-pandemic
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https://www.statnews.com/2019/04/29/measles-case-count-in-the-u-s-tops-700-this-year-as-health-officials-urge-vaccinations/
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Measles resurgence in the USA: how international travel compounds vaccine resistance
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3099(19)30231-2/fulltext?utm_campaign=lancet&utm_content=91541955&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter&hss_channel=tw-27013292
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https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp1902683
nick
The Ebola outbreak isn't worse in DRC, it's just that population of DRC is even stupider than that of West Africa.
Which is saying something.
And predictably, the stupid is outpacing the ability to vaccinate around the epidemic, and it's now beginning to do in DRC, even with a vaccine, what it did in WAfrica without one: go...well,...viral.
WAfrica exploded, because no one outside the Hot Zone wanted to notice the obvious.
So, here we are in 2019, SSDD.
QED
Here's today's report:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/may/15/terrifying-ebola-epidemic-out-of-control-in-drc-say-experts
Here is some info for today 17may2017.
YOU DONE TOLD US !!!!!
Doctors have to go undercover and have LEFT areas.
https://www.ctpost.com/news/article/Doctors-go-undercover-to-fight-Ebola-in-violent-13852225.php
Darwin hard at work
Goose
Africa Wins Again
Unlimited thanks Aesop for keeping up on this. Good intel is near impossible to find elsewhere.
If it gets here you can be sure .gov will keep it as quiet as possible for as long as possible. In this day of internet that won't be for very long. But the mechanisms to shut down all or part of the net are in place. Watch for that as a sign. Hope you aren't in the blacked out area.
John Wilder - you missed the part where, likely way too late, .gov institutes martial law. My guess is that will be too little to late and a desperation move.
If things get spicy via any path the real fun begins when the electrons cease their oscillations on wires. As many above and elsewhere have noted we depend on those little fundamental particles. What is really sobering - most people don't have a clue about this or things like JIT supply for just about everything. The reaping from that alone will be vast.
One last thought on Ebola-chan and those who think it is now big deal b/c its a CDC thing. I don't really give a fig if it is genetically engineered by the CDC or whomever and most importantly NEITHER DOES EBOLA-CHAN. Things in the wild do their own thing and things like viruses undergo unexpected changes in a short time in human terms.
Bio hazard level 4 enclosed and filtered environment to prevent the spread with pressurized air locks and decontamination for both entry and departure.
"There are now 108 health workers infected with the virus, including two newly diagnosed workers from Kalunguta and Mabalako. Both had been vaccinated. Thirty-six health workers have died during this outbreak."
Interesting info from CIDRAP today!
http://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2019/05/experts-drc-ebola-outbreak-fueled-attacks
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