Someone asked in comments to the various previous posts about a review of "best practices" to shelter wherever (here, there, wherever) to ride out Ebola.
Okay, here goes.
1) Go to your Happy Place.
2) Seal your perimeter (I suggest with concertina rolls, at minimum), and defend up to and including deadly force.
3) Decon anything within throwing range of that perimeter with a bottle of 1/2 gasoline, and 1/2 dish soap, with some metallic aluminum glitter mixed it as condensation nuclei. (The precocious will notice that is functionally called napalm.) Or, get yourself an XL-18. (Perhaps several!)
4) Stay inside until 40+ days beyond the last reported case. I'd probably wait 60-90 days. YMMV. And it assumes anyone will be able to tell you the last infectious date. Got comms??
(Bear in mind in West Africa, the December 2013 outbreak lasted until January 2016. 25 months. That is not a typo, anywhere.)
5) Don't come out of your perimeter for anything, and don't let anyone else in for that time.
Ever. Whatsoever. Period.
The perspicacious may notice this would have no small effect on, um...civilization as we know it. Then again, so would a pandemic and hundreds of thousands to millions of deaths. Just saying.
You pays your nickel and you takes your chances.
I'm just assuming you're a bit more concerned about the lives of you and your own family than you are about those other 7 billion souls' problems. As you should be.
That's it, easy-peasey.
The entire strategy.
(People who've thought about this stuff realize, probably long before this point in the post, that this means being able to supply yourself with food, water, power, heating, medical aid, fire-fighting and security, communications, local intelligence, and all the other necessities of life, for an extended period, with zero outside resources. Such details are far beyond the scope of a single blog post. So I'd advise those to whom this is news to get on with providing yourself those abilities, I beseech you.)
Ebola will not low-crawl under your wire and butt-rape you.
I'd be sure and screen out transit in or out by four-legged visitors too, including squirrels and such, not to mention der fleiedermaus species, on principle.
And FWIW, I wouldn't try to simulate Ebola infection marking, nor any other.
a) People who actually have Ebola will not be deterred.
b) People starving and desperate will not be deterred either.
c) Such marking may be used by TPTB as a means of deciding which places to burn to the ground at some point. (That'd really suck for you, to survive a pandemic, only to be wiped out by whatever follows, because of them thinking you were infected. Don't get cute about this.)
d) Sensible people might shoot you on sight if they ever saw you coming out, thinking you were still infected.
So don't do anything that stupid.
Hang your own version of "F**K OFF!" signs, with a skull and crossbones, and that should do the trick.
Someone else asked what I'd be doing if it came to my hospital.
In a nutshell:
Ebola comes in, confirmed, and I'm going out. Then and there.
I have been in no hospital in my entire working career that's remotely prepared to do anything but get me, you, and everyone else in proximity, killed by attempting to deal with this disease.
I have no compunctions about "looking badass" in the face of a virus not impressed by half-assed measures and trying to "save face". Others can save face. I'll be saving my ass.
I can take my license literally anywhere I like, including anywhere from the Arctic Circle to Tierra Del Fuego just in this hemisphere, and I'm not worried about "looking good" to people who want to re-arrange deck chairs on the Titanic, instead of heading for the lifeboats. Heroes, in this sort of thing, become dead heroes. I don't want to die because I was stupid, in hopes maybe someone who survived, somewhere may someday carve my name on a stone monument, along with hundreds of others.
I'ma GTFO, and I'll be one of those survivors.
We get a BL-IV containment wing, and train on its use, and we can talk about me staying and playing under those circumstances. Nothing less will suffice.
Never share a foxhole with anyone braver than you. - Murphy's Laws Of Combat
That is all.
For a second I thought the final pic was one of those "click on all the squares with whatever". I'll play: 1MC and a battle lantern.
ReplyDeleteI had an actual comment but the words not be come out right. Must be bedtime. BTW, where does one buy concertina wire? Asking for myself, not for a friend. At this point I kinda don't want any friends as they appear to be liabilities. Sigh.
@robert
ReplyDeleteyou can get it from amazon or a great many other outlets. no different than buying chainlink or fencewire.
https://www.repurposedmaterialsinc.com/razor-wire/razor-wire-40-rolls/
ReplyDeletethat happened to show up in my inbox. FYI.
Has anyone figured out what the non-human vector is? Can it spread via insect bites (think plague or malaria)? Especially from animal to human as opposed to between humans (where it appears to require direct contact with infected fluids)?
ReplyDeleteBig issue for anyone whose preps count on either keeping domestic animals or hunting for food.....
Mark D
No, they have no idea.
ReplyDeleteEven the halfwitted attempts to palm it off on bats beg the questions:
So where do the bats get it from?
And how does it get from bats to all the other animals?
I'm pretty sure chimpanzees, etc. and small antelopes aren't eating undercooked "bush meat".
So they're still nowhere, AFAIK.
Anyone planning on leaving a safe, Ebola-free perimeter, and venturing into the wilds to hunt during an outbreak, hasn't been paying any attention to the point, is a functional moron, and deserves to die for egregious public stupidity.
And probably will.
As for domestic livestock, an animal-tight quarantine is just that.
Either nothing outside (short of insects and bird) can get in, or it can, and your animals are still at risk. And thus you would be too.
If, contrary to anonymous assertions, there is some insect vector or connection, you need to keep them out of your food animals too. That gets spendy in a hurry, and may be an ultimately futile attempt.
Either way, this is the same problem they had in every Jurassic Park movie, just at the opposite end of the size spectrum: it's a zookeeping problem.
How to keep the beasties away from the people.
Just for the record, the reason I'm thinking of transmission from animal to human is because the REAL deadly (human) diseases (smallpox, flu, plague, etc) jumped species, and in their original host species (chickens, pigs, rats) they're not an especially serious disease because killing your host, especially quickly, isn't a good strategy for a virus.
ReplyDeleteSo thinking thru, the possible vectors from animal to human (in generally ascending order of hard-to-prevent) would be:
Consumption of meat from an infected animal (probably avoidable thru proper cooking)
Direct contact with infected animal product (fluids, feces, etc).
Indirect contact via some third-part (like an insect).
Airborne virus
It doesn't APPEAR to be airborne (yet) (as you noted, Ebola's not going to low-crawl up on you).
As far as the bats, don't most bats live on insects? I think some eat fruit (now THERE'S a scary prospect). Vampire bats notwithstanding, if bats are an issue they're probably getting it from the insects they consume.
Which brings us to the $10,000 question: Why the f*ck are we still allowing people from Africa into the country without undergoing a quarantine to show they're not carrying Ebola? Forgetting for a moment those who come in illegally, why are there still inter-continental flights FROM Africa to ANYWHERE? Why aren't those planes told, upon requesting landing at their destination, told "Sorry, you'll have to turn around and go home"?
The best way to survive an Ebola outbreak in the US is to not HAVE an Ebola outbreak in the US, but it seems TPTB are determined to go for Plan B.
And people ask me why I drink.....
Mark D
Thanks for the fantastic coverage and analysis. Long time reader and this is spot-on, you keep dumping out those golden eggs of goodness! Gaming this for your personal plans is, shall we say, an interesting exercise. Here is a link to a page for modeling your take on how "hot" ebola is and the effects of various parameters. Readers, take it for a spin and some eye-opening results. Link: https://econometricsbysimulation.shinyapps.io/Ebola-Dynamic-Model/
ReplyDeleteThank for your the condensed "how-to-survive" post. Is it fair to say that ~90 days after the last case, it's unlikely you'll be infected from (human) survivors of the virus? I read that the virus is still present in survivors, but not in all their fluids and thus not as easily transmissible.
ReplyDeleteMy daughter is an EMT. Since she became an EMT, I've learned that EMTs are not as well trained and equipped as we would expect first responders to be trained and equipped.
ReplyDeleteSo, first Ebola shows up, she gets exposed. If she shows symptoms, her mother will insist on mothering her. My wife is highly susceptible to infections. If I get a sniffle, she gets a cold. If I get a cold, she gets the flu. If I get the flu, she gets pneumonia....
Reckon my wife and I become separated at that moment. I believe we have some talking to do tonight.
"
ReplyDeleteSo, first Ebola shows up, she gets exposed. If she shows symptoms,"
by then it's too late, which is the problem...
n
"Just for the record, the reason I'm thinking of transmission from animal to human is because the REAL deadly (human) diseases (smallpox, flu, plague, etc) jumped species, and in their original host species (chickens, pigs, rats) they're not an especially serious disease because killing your host, especially quickly, isn't a good strategy for a virus."
ReplyDeleteSmallpox ONLY infected humans, which is the main reason we managed to wipe it out, it had no where to hide.
Its interesting, almost everything we did to wipe out smallpox, we arent doing now
Cowpox and Chickenpox are similar to smallpox, and cowpox may have at some pint jumped and become small pox, but it was a one time deal.
"I read that the virus is still present in survivors, but not in all their fluids and thus not as easily transmissible."
Yep, eyeball, spinal fluid, semen.
Can it be transmitted via sex, we don't know, can it jump from spinal fluid, back to blood, and make the host symptomatic, we don't know, can it jump from spinal fluid to blood and infect others without the host becoming symptomatic, we don't know.
Cowpox and Chickenpox are similar to smallpox
ReplyDeleteNo. Cowpox is in the same genus (Orthopoxvirus) as Smallpox while Chickenpox (Varicella) is a Herpes virus (varicella-zoster virus).
They present very differently as well.
" Why the f*ck are we still allowing people from Africa into the country without undergoing a quarantine"
ReplyDeleteI take it that was rhetorical. But if not:
Muh Slavery!
Muh Colonialism!
Muh Emmett Till!
I don't want to see China succeed in Africa, but if China does, the Africans will find that King Leopold was a piker.
Chinese (meaning Han, of course) cannot be guilt-tripped, particularly on racial or religious lines, and they'd gladly exterminate all the natives if they thought they could get away with it.