Coronavirus: What Vintage Skills Can Help Prepare for a Potential Pandemic?

Anyone have any suggestions from history that can be helpful with dealing with the spread of Coronavirus? Things we can do at home and while out in public--anything from prepping, prevention and psychological well-being?

(Bartenders or anyone: How do I edit the title of the thread to correct the misspelling of Coronavirus??)

Use good ol' common sense and live life as usual.

We are from being in Pandemic situation, not even close. Sorry, but I can't contribute to mass hysteria.

I respectfully ask that people contributing to this thread not throw passive insults. I do not see my question or posting as a contribution to mass hysteria. Thank you.

Common sense goes back hundreds of years. That's about as vintage as it gets.
For myself & wife, we live on rural acreage so we're somewhat sequestered to begin with. Plus we always have a commodities inventory to last several months.
But when getting out around people, there'll be no more hand shakes, no more physical contact. And I'd be fine with it if that becomes an permanent thing.
Best to keep some perspective. The US has reported only approx 20 cases out of a population of over 325 million. Hopefully the people who are ill with any type of respiratory conflict will wear something to prevent the spread of their vapor or just stay home until they're well. And the healthy people have no need to wear masks and such since most won't protect from airborne viruses anyway.
I do have a couple of professional grade respirator masks should things go full on road warrior. But I expect the only thing I'll be using them for is for spray painting.

M Brown said:

But when getting out around people, there'll be no more hand shakes, no more physical contact. And I'd be fine with it if that becomes an permanent thing.

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I'm with you on that one!

What is of concern is that the recent two cases on the West Coast had been walking around in public (one is a school teacher!) because they didn't know they had it:

"The patients — two in California, a high school student in Everett, Washington, and an employee at a Portland, Oregon-area school — hadn’t recently traveled overseas or had any known close contact with a traveler or an infected person, authorities said."

https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/coronavirus-cases-unknown-origin-found-west-coast-69301250

Who knows how many people they may have infected, and on it can go.

Your mention of commodities inventory is interesting.

To those who think this won't affect you, even if you never get sick, have you checked your 401k, etc? There's a lot to consider!

During the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918 the spread of the virus was aided by large concentrations of men living in close, comparatively unsanitary conditions in Army camps. We don't have a situation today in the US that precisely duplicates that -- large, self-contained concentrations of people who could easily transfer a virus to other large self-contained concentrations of people who could repeat the process until it hits the epidemic stage and spreads int the general population.

To put some perspective here, over 670,000 Americans died of the Spanish flu, and most of them within the space of about six weeks during the fall of 1918. There's been nothing even approaching that in the century since. And more than a few of those people died as a direct result of the public panic -- many patients actually starved to death because they were locked in their homes and nobody dared to approach them for fear of catching the sickness themselves.

As long as we don't approach that level of panic, this situation isn't likely to even come close to what happened in 1918.

As far as practical methods of avoiding it, people used a lot of Lysol or carbolic acid to boil sheets and clothing, those being pretty much the only effective disinfectants available over the counter. Some people wore surgical masks in the street, although these were known even then to be ineffectual, and most went to great lengths to avoid physical contact with other people -- it was common to see people in the street heavily dressed, booted, hatted, and gloved so that only their eyes were visible, so afraid were they of picking up the virus. The movie industry nearly collapsed, because in many cities theatres were closed by government decree, and those that were open couldn't draw audiences. The baseball season had ended early because of the war, but most other sports events were postponed as stadiums and arenas were closed. In some cities, even churches were closed by government order.

The freak thing about the 1918 flu is that it killed mostly young adults -- largely because young adults made up the bulk of the people concentrated in those unsanitary Army camps.

Probably the most famous flu epidemic since 1918 was the Hong Kong/Asian Flu of 1968-69. About 38,000 people died in the US during that pandemic, and my mother, then a reasonably-healthy 30-year-old woman, was almost one of them. She was a heavy smoker, and her lungs were particularly vulnerable to infection because of it. Perhaps if one is a smoker today, the Coronavirus will be one more motivation to quit.

Thank you, Lizzie!

What we do have now but didn't back then is the internet and constant news updates, so news and speculation are not contained and spread in an instant. I'm equally afraid of the response from the public as I am of the virus. The stock market crashing, people stockpiling things/shortages (here in Maine I couldn't find hand sanitizer locally, had to go online, and even then it wasn't readily available on Amazon. I use that for old-fashioned germs of any sort. Is it like that in Rockland? I even saw many cleared shelves of some basics when I was grocery shopping), buying large quantities of respirators and then reselling them at 5x the price and up so total price gouging happening, and this is only the beginning. It's hard to imagine the virus really taking off and having hysteria at the same time. With that said, it's important to take prudent steps to prepare and ensure we can protect ourselves psychologically and physically.

As for the movie industry, that does seem like it will take a hit, and maybe tourism here in Maine? I hope not.

PrettySquareGal said:

Anyone have any suggestions from history that can be helpful with dealing with the spread of Coronavirus? Things we can do at home and while out in public--anything from prepping, prevention and psychological well-being?

(Bartenders or anyone: How do I edit the title of the thread to correct the misspelling of Coronavirus??)

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While the text can be edited, I don't think the title of the thread can be edited. I didn't notice it until you pointed it out.

Héctor Fernández said:

Between the media, Facebook, and Twitter, we are already dead, so why feed into it.

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Because polite society is capable of having a balanced discussion without hysteria or hyperbole.

Peacoat said:

While the text can be edited, I don't think the title of the thread can be edited.

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Oh, that's too bad but thank you!

PrettySquareGal said:

Oh, that's too bad but thank you!

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I fixed it for you. Found a different way to skin the cat.

Peacoat said:

I fixed it for you. Found a different way to skin the cat.

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That's great, thank you!

I don’t know enough to have an opinion worth more than it cost you.

Neither do most people.

However, I do not believe, as one equally inexpert but much more prominent person said recently, that we will be at “zero or near zero” cases in this country “soon.” Events in the few days since that utterance was made have shown it to be wildly optimistic.

In such circumstances as these, it is beyond irresponsible to pretend to any level of expertise a person plainly doesn’t possess.

And now I see an ad here for a face mask called an N95 filter.

PrettySquareGal said:

Anyone have any suggestions from history that can be helpful with dealing with the spread of Coronavirus? Things we can do at home and while out in public--anything from prepping, prevention and psychological well-being?

(Bartenders or anyone: How do I edit the title of the thread to correct the misspelling of Coronavirus??)

Click to expand...

I have an interesting take on germs and virus contagion. From the age of 60 to 69 I was a contractor working in high rise office buildings. My work entailed visiting each office in a building twice over the course of a day to conduct air testing. I touched every doorknob in every suite in buildings some as high as 40 stories. I touched hand rails, elevator buttons and common surfaces within each suite. Theoretical I may have had peripheral contact with most people in the entire building including visitors over the course of my workday.

I did not wash my hands during the day. Somedays I would wash prior to lunch, somedays not. I likely was a gross repository of every germ in that building. Over the almost 10 years of doing that work I missed one day due to sickness and it was a minor infection NOT the cold or flu.

To me my history over this period suggests that falling ill with colds and flu viruses is much more related to the ability of our immune systems to thwart the germs rather than exposure to them. We swim in a stew of mould, bacteria, germs and virus.

tonyb said:

I don’t know enough to have an opinion worth more than it cost you.

Neither do most people.

However, I do not believe, as one equally inexpert but much more prominent person said recently, that we will be at “zero or near zero” cases in this country “soon.” Events in the few days since that utterance was made have shown it to be wildly optimistic.

In such circumstances as these, it is beyond irresponsible to pretend to any level of expertise a person plainly doesn’t possess.

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I'm not asking for fortune-telling. I'm asking for people to share tips, tricks and knowledge of what people did in the past to cope with a world-wide virus.

I used to post here frequently many years ago. The overall tone has changed. I was thinking there would be more posts like Lizzie's. My mistake. Also, your comment has veered into politics so maybe it's best if this thread is closed. Bartenders, feel free. Thanks.

The stock market isn't something I pay much attention to -- I already don't have any money, so the ups and downs of the market have comparatively little effect on me. But I do see panic-buying going on in the stores -- I never use hand sanitizer myself because I can't abide the smell of it, so I've never noticed whether it's around in the stores or not, but I did look when I went to the store just now and the stock was rather drastically depleted.

I've never been a germophobe -- I grew up in a dirty house, in a dirty neighborhood, in constant proximity to other dirty runny-nosed kids, and when I got sick I got sick and then I got over it. I think part of the hand-sanitizer panic grows out of the current OMG GERMZ/ultra anti-bacterial culture that's grown up over the past twenty years ago. It's the first thing people think to do when there's any bug going around, and because of all the hype about this one, of course they're going to buy the stuff. The Boys themselves couldn't have come up with a better marketing plan.

The surgical mask thing is more worrisome. They won't work, they don't work for the purpose people are buying them for and they're taking them away from people who actually need and use them in their work. So I wish people would lay off with that.

At this point, most of what I'm seeing is the same kind of OMG SNOW BUY BATTERIES MILK AND DUCT TAPE kind of panic you see among newly-arrived outastaters when the first flake of snow falls. But hopefully, once the initial media panic has settled down to something more realistic all that will settle down.

Actually, if I was going to buy anything to prepare for an emergency I'd buy a pallet of tuna fish. Me and my cat could both live on that for a while until it all blows over.

Don't worry, the stock market is far from been a barometer.

As to surgical masks, the only masks that are actually worth buying are the 3M N95, anything else is marginally good.

I think, at least on this side of the pond, the effects will mostly be economic. While everyone is currently focusing on stocks, the impact of this in reality is going to lag.

Supply chains are currently being interrupted, and manufacturing in China is reportedly down quite a bit. We'll feel these effects over the next few weeks and months, depending on severity.

As far as vintage methods for dealing with this? As previously mentioned, common sense, good hygiene, and careful contact are always good ideas. However, in this case, vintage is not the way to go. Give me all the technology and medical advances in a case like this. I want to avail myself of things they didn't have in 1918.

One of my writing clients is based in China, and she got out of there extremely quick once this all flared up. She wasn't anywhere near the nexus of the outbreak, but also didn't want to take any chances. So far, though, all indications are that the work I do for her will proceed without interruption. IP doesn't really have supply-chain issues, unless *I* get sick.