What set this whole thing in motion?

What made you think it’s going to be a big deal? (Risk assessment)

Book: “The Great Influenza”

First week of February: cancelling all travel plans (Arto Bendiken).

“An earthquake happened in Wuhan, and the tsunami will follow. It is hard to see the tsunami until it comes close to the shore, but it will follow.” (Arto citing Steve)

Analytical preparation, emotional process (fear) comes later.

Reactions by others: accusations of panicking.

Convincing others to prepare?

People buy insurance for things that are less likely to happen.

NN Taleb’s Tweet on Paranoia: “When paranoid, you can be wrong 1000 times & you will survive. If non-paranoid; wrong once, and you, your genes, & the rest of your group are done.”

Balaji S. Srinivasan’s Three categories of people: “1) Post-headline people: only believe things that are already in print 2) No filter people: forget it, they’ll believe anything :) 3) Pre-headline people: will listen to a rational argument and look at primary data”.

Authority bias: Credentials, degrees, other people’s opinion.

Talking to family and friends about situation when there was still time to prepare.

Cassandra Myth (Iliad)

Uniform set of responses: you’re panicking and making it worse, dismissal

Bill Gates warned about pandemics long ago, but was dismissed as a college dropout and IT guy. (Confirmation bias, ad hominem attack)

Bill Gates: “The most predictable disaster in the history of the human race”.

Albert Camus: These things have a way of reocurring out of the blue sky.

Increased risk factors: base risk plus big cities, international travel.

On average, three pandemics a century.

Ebola outbreak was a close call. Hongkong Flu (1 million dead), late 1960s.

Many animal to human transmissions were contained early by slaughtering millions of animals at the slightest sign of sickness. (Economical cost!)

Vaccines and public health system. (Smallpox)

We are still in the beginning of the economic impact.

Bias to focus on things that are caused by humans. Helplessness when confronted with pandemics.

Man-made virus from Wuhan lab?

Illegaly sold lab test animal at wet market? (野味 yewei, bush meat; 街市 jieshi, wet market)

Cognitive bias: systematic error of thinking. Man is the rationalizing animal. (Example: seeing faces in clouds)

Examples of observed biases: authority bias, confirmation bias, combinations of these.

Normalcy bias (nobody wants to be bothered to change routines).

Max Brooks (World War Z): Fear of pandemics is so deep, cannot be discussed rationally. Zombies = Pandemic.

Virus is an abstract threat, there will be 1 trillion copies of it by infection.

Plague: people did not even know what caused infection. (Germ theory)

Are Zombie enthusiasts better prepared for a virus pandemic?

Trying to find out what’s going on fundamentally vs. latching onto experts.

Engaging brain about status vs. primary data.

People starting with the premise that they are not smart enough to understand what’s actually going on, not making any effort of their own.

Trying to understand incoming data, for example the first papers coming out of Wuhan.

Impossible to keep up with current findings, research, and papers.

More data globally, in the beginning filtering was easier.

Mon, March 16th: currently 170.000 confirmed cases, 5000-6000 dead.

Confirmed cases != infections

Impossible to keep up with new cases.

“Confirmed case count”= comes with limitations (manpower, test kits).

Again, not enough test kits (USA, Berlin). Wuhan could test only 3000/day in the beginning.

“Confirmed cases”= lag in data.

“When people focus on these official measures… that are limited by staffing, test kits, by political considerations, then that’s not a good way… of understanding what’s going on.”

“That’s why it was so good to get this leaked information, leaked videos, from Wuhan. That way we got a sense of what was actually going on.”

The plural of anecdote is data.

Investigative Reporting.

Actions speak louder than data: Measures against the virus were severe. 1 Mio people in lockdown, 10% of global population.

Mathematical Modelling… common problems:

Case fatality rate.

Role of WHO: gives recommendations for guidelines, funding by member countries (China among them), driven by political considerations.

Public health emergencies of international concern (PHEIC).

WHO got rid of the term “pandemic”.

“Naïve” Case Fatality Rate (CFR), released by WHO. First, 2.1% (mostly China); revised 3.5%, and going up.

SARS initial outbreak CRF ~2%, but by the end of the outbreak, it was ~6% (resolved CFR).

Makes no sense to compare past cases to current cases (open cases vs. resolved).

CFR for age groups: not taking into consideration system overload (needed care might not be provided).

CFR only says so much, 20% require hospitalization, many of those need ICU.

Hospitals in Italy are already overwhelmed, will worsen until end of the week.

Italy’s CFR is already higher than China’s.

Cases overload the medical system, secondary effect: death rates go up.

Investment options.

Supply chain problems.

“It’s always about efficieny, never about risk of failure.”

Pandemic response bears a similar problem like IT security.

“It’s a bit like prepping: no matter how bad it gets, you want to be overreacting in retrospect, otherwise, you didn’t prep enough. And, you’re not gonna hit exactly on target, so you wanna err on the side of overreaction.”

Control theory (robotics): accuracy vs. speed.

“You don’t have them [the respirators] until you have them in your hand” … “It’s like cash”.

Only stock up on masks if you intend to not avoid people.

Ukrainian border confiscated protective gear when trying to cross border to Poland (export is forbidden).

Idea that you don’t need respirators:

Why didn’t hospitals stock up in January?

How can wearing a mask not help?

“Wearing a respirator makes it less likely you’re getting infected yourself, … and wearing a surgical mask … helps not infecting other people, so it makes total sense that everyone wears at least surgical masks”.

Men’s issue: shaving gel and razors (beards and masks don’t go well together).

People tend to be dismissive of people with health problems, who might need medication or health care, and the elderly (“It kills only old people!”).

Ukrainian health care system is monopolized by state (surgeries, child birth, vaccine). “A public hospital is the last place I want to go [in the Ukraine]”.

Contingency planning differs on country.

“The real carnage is going to be in third-world countries, just like it was in 1918”. (USA: 675.000 vs. India: 2 Million, Spanish Flu)

Lviv Infecitous Diseases Hospital messaged it would be well-prepared with 20 isolation beds (and plans to expand to 300), 4 ventilators, 0 ECMO, 10.000 surgical masks and respirators.

No difficulty to buy antibiotics in Ukraine, whereas in other countries it’s highly regulated (prescription vs. over the counter).

Chloroquine is promising in treatment of COVID-19 (malaria drug).

Paracetamol is not easy to buy in bulk. India also has restricted export (Indians source precursors from China, too).

Arto’s housing situation: countryside Western Ukraine, foothills of Carpathians. Frank: Berlin suburbs.

Where do you stay put, and with whom?

Think about your scenario: staying inside apartment for a long time.

Most likely scenario: you stay indoors, everything works (electricity, water, internet)

If electricity goes down for extended periods, water goes down. The big problem is not drinking water, but sanitation.

Water filter

“I tried to focus on stuff that I normally eat anyway, … I just got a lot more, so it doesn’t go to waste. Other things like rice bags, I got as an insurance, but the rest I would eat anyway.”

Threat model and scenario.

“… if the situation gets particulary bad, which it might over here [in Ukraine] at least, I would expect some more outages, for the internet connectivity, there’s multiple options for that, so I expect at least one of them working.”

A lot of people getting sick means a lot of people not working, especially in grid systems workers might not be able to fix things in time.

“For the internet, we will see how well that works if everybody’s sitting at home watching netflix, or porn in full HD.”

Mobile internet.

Mitigate risk for short downtimes.

Wuhan pictures from people queuing for water.

Mitigate risk of having to go to the store a lot.

Going out for walks, just don’t meet anybody (countryside).

“Although I’m now pretty well prepared compared to most people, it kinda caught me cold-handed… because I was always interested in prepping, and I was always planning on prepping more for when SHTF, but I never really executed that much. But when I started six weeks ago, I realized how much harder… it was than I imagined, and also how much harder it was because… of such a short notice, and it was getting harder to get things, for example the respirators. It would have been so easy to stock up on all of this stuff. For example, the ridiculous situation that you had to ship me antibiotics from Ukraine although I was in Ukraine in January, I should have just bought all the prescription medicine a prepper needs.”

Early Infections in Italy, Seattle, etc. happened in January/Feburary. COVID-19 death in Spain 2 weeks before the first confirmed case there. (Lack of indicator)

Cheap carbohydrates, easy to store. (“Insurance”)

Newly acquired freezer to stock up on meat.

Add variety, if you switch to carbohydrates.

Deliveries still working.

Freeze butter, or make Ghee.

“Right now, people in the last week or two stopped laughing… and stopped repeating this mindless It’s Just The Flu, Bro… in any case, they’re still expecting this will be over soon. … And authorities are still telling them it will be over soon, prepare for a few weeks.”

“It’s always better if you’re dealing with a foreign virus, than with a domestic virus”.

Once China resumes work, and life, there will be another wave.

Countries which deal well with it: outbreak, containment measures, a lot of testing, tracking, and contact tracing -> situation under control, problem: reintroduction from other countries.

The Virus can travel up to 4,5m, passenger infected others through a long-distance bus ride.

Controlling coming waves, keeping the country in lockdown is not a solution unless we transition to a permanentely remote economy.

Appeal from engineer perspective.

Germany outruled events with more than 50 people, but if you do an event with less people, you need to create a list of all attendees. (old school approach)

“Acceptance pipeline”, dealing with grief: it won’t be over soon.

Pipe dream: Many place hope on vaccine development.

Accepting that there’s no easy fix.

It’s hard to plan to stay in apartment for 18 months.

Learn from past pandemics (1918 Spanish flu, 3 waves).

Spanish flu: passed through ships, first cases (first wave) very mild, less than influenza, less than COVID-19. Second wave, 5 months of carnage. Worse than COVID-19, at least currently. Third wave, somewhere in between.

Practical preparations for 6 months is difficult (economically).

Good thing: remote work will be more accepted.

Supply run gear for securing supplies

Surfaces: virus can be contangious on surfaces a few days (up to 9 days).

Coming from outside to inside.

Sourcing is already hard, will become more difficult.

Power issues.

Sanitation

Disinfectant

Medical

Pregnancies.

Chronic diseases and cancer patients.

Hygiene and Sanitary Items.

Tradeables.

Send us your questions!

Expert: Jon Stokes, ThePrepared.com. Founder of Ars Technica.

Book Recommendation: Barry, John M. (2004): The Great Influenza. The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History.

Book Recommendation: Hatfill, Steven; Coullahan, Robert; Walsh, John (2019): Three Seconds To Midnight.

“Bottom line here is: People underestimated this systematically. … Systemic error of thinking, they underestimated it, and they continue to underestimate it, even though they are no longer laughing, they continue to underestimate it. … This is something that has not happened in any of our lifetimes, there’s no listener who has seen anything that has been on the order of this, and it would be very good to get out of our normalcy bias.”

Donation Report and Minimum Wage Calculation.