
Ask HN: What can we personally do to prep for the coronavirus? - arikr
I’m guessing buy a bunch of non perishable food, a can opener, and a bunch of bottled water, so that we can hold up in our house if needed.<p>What else?
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apotatopot
Probably get in the habit of washing your hands as much as possible, not
touching your face/eyes/nose/mouth, wear gloves when touching things in public
places, and washing the gloves every time you wear them. Also, don't get too
close to people. I've heard 1.5 meters is a good distance.

Just in case things get crazy, flashlights & batteries, candles, a backup
cooking method like a fire pit or camping stove, first aid kit & maybe some
paracord, and good knife (you don't want to end up using scissors or steak
knives for everything). Maybe extra phone battery things/solar charger and a
radio. Also, habitually keep your gas tank over a quarter tank if you can.
There's probably a pretty good exhausting list somewhere by fema or something.

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jerf
Best food prep isn't just to buy "cans of stuff", but to buy things you eat
anyhow that happens to be preservable. That way, rather than blowing a lot of
money on stuff you may never use, you're merely forward-loading some food
spending. The ideal is to get yourself into the habit of using that stuff on a
relatively regular basis, but replacing it as you use it rather than when you
run out, thus keeping a buffer. In particular, you want to _fight_ the idea
that "this is my food reserve and I shouldn't touch it", because that's how
you get old, useless reserves when you need them. You _want_ to use them, you
just also want to replenish them as you go, then you always have things usable
if necessary. Don't forget to use it as a queue, first-in-first-out, despite
the fact the physical world tends to make a stack more natural by just putting
the new stuff you just bought in front.

This is a good idea for the coronavirus, sure, but more importantly, it's a
good idea anyhow. Society and civilization in general are more resilient
against _all kinds_ of issues if people aren't generally starving from a
single burp in the distribution networks. The coronavirus may turn out to be
as much of a nothingburger for the US as SARS was, but _something_ is going to
happen _somewhere_ to _somebody_ (who may be you) for which reserves will be
very useful.

You probably can't prep for the total collapse of civilization and even those
who think they have probably haven't. But you can and should prep for
interruptions and extended outages of various bits of civilization, because
they do still happen. Just this last summer, in an area with generally good
power reliability, we had a very large, very powerful windstorm come through
and cut the power lines in literally several hundred places in the area, and
dropped a tree on our local neighborhood transformer. I was without power for
5 days. But it was really just an annoyance... we were pretty much ready for
it.

For coronavirus particularly, I think food and any other supplies you may need
(medicines, animal food) is the main focus. I wouldn't expect to lose power or
water. (Water is the worst. I've got some backup plans against that if I need
to, but they won't necessarily be a lot of fun...) The worst one for us would
be some of the prescription medicines we have that they won't really let us
get too far in advance. (For my family, none of them are life threatening, but
could be a problem.)

