Disaster Preparation: Diseases

Not much has happened and already people are freaking out

My wife went to buy hand soap yesterday and the shop was restricting purchases to one per person.

It seems the panic over the yet-to-arrive Covid-19 pandemic is spreading. Yesterday saw a flurry of announcements: first death in Japan, several new domestic cases.

We wrote about disaster preparation last year, so I thought it might be interesting to build on that post today with reference to the latest kerfuffle.

Is there cause for concern?

I am not in any way qualified to comment on this 🙂

This may turn into a serious problem or it may not. Right now, with just a handful of cases and one death in Japan, it does not seem like something I need to concern myself with.

That cruise ship situation seems a mess, as does the one that can’t seem to dock anywhere. Might avoid taking my first cruise for a while.

Also Stormzy cancelled his Tokyo concert 🙁

For now I guess the best approach is to keep an eye on the situation and try not to think about it too much.

What can we do to get ready?

There are some things we could do to prepare for a possible health crisis, but they are pretty similar to general disaster preparation, so probably not a waste of time.

The first useful thing you could do is to make sure that you have enough supply of food, water, and necessities to survive for a few days or weeks. This will be equally useful if you find yourself staying home to avoid being infected with a disease or in the aftermath of a natural disaster.

Another would be to confirm useful sources of information: local, national, and international. If the situation worsens we will probably see all sorts of rumours and misleading articles and social media posts. This seems like a fairly level-headed source of advice.

We can also talk to family members and friends and make plans. In a natural disaster, I would probably try to leave the area but for a disease situation this would probably be counter-productive and it would be safer to remain at home away from crowds.

What we are doing

Right now my family and I are lazily monitoring the situation and thinking about responses. One specific thing we are considering is what to do with my wife’s school if we are forced to suspend classes: the best option seems to be to find a way of continuing classes online using Skype or a similar service.

We’ll need to look into how to do that, and maybe try a test run with some willing students.

We already had some supplies at home, but I guess I will try to build up our food and necessities stocks a bit more (one easy way to do this that I saw online recently is just to buy two of everything non-perishable that you might need when you go shopping).

How about you? Are you doing anything in response to the Covid-19 news stories?

7 Responses

  1. I just went to three home centres and two drug stores, at 8am-9am opening time. There was a ten-deep line up at the first store before the doors opened. We all filed straight to the mask section. No stock. None of the stores had any masks, hand sanitising gel or alcohol wipes. Not even in the baby diaper section. If the virus does break out in Japan, they/we will not cope. The panic buying is crazy. I take a very crowded train to work daily and I wear a mask year round so I was just after one pack. …

    2. I live close to Ame-yokocho which is a traditional shopping area close to Ueno station in Tokyo. Here is the same, masks are out of stock in all drugstores.

      Since the Chinese New Year, about a month ago, I have noticed there were no Chinese tourists in the area. Later, I saw in the news the Chinese government suspended all group tourism travels departing from China.

      I believe it will have an impact on the Japanese economy

  2. Masks sold out here in Matsuyama, Ehime. Last week I saw two old people start to shove each other to get the last box of masks in a store. Makes you wonder what would happen if things really got desperate. On balance I’m not that worried, though my family and I are adding to our usual level of emergency supplies. As we have our own English school we do wonder at what point we would have to close, though I don’t imagine it will get to that stage. A few years ago most of the local schools where our students go had classes closed due to flu, so we simply closed most of our classes for a week and refunded fees. Not ideal but most parents were grateful – so good PR – and I had a week to catch up on other things.

  3. Part of the reason for the shortage of masks and hand sanitizer is that much of Japan’s supply is manufactured in China. However, many factories in China are shut down, and for those that are operational, I’m sure their supply is slated to remain in China. PM Abe has apparently allocated funds to increase the domestic supply of these, and Japan’s domestic manufacturers are gearing up to increase their production, but can they fill the shortfall quickly? Only time will tell.

    When I have the time, I watch certain Japanese news and information programs. My go to shows include the “Morning Show” at 8 a.m. weekdays on Asahi (channel 5 in Tokyo, host is Hatori Shinichi) and “hiruobi” at 1025 weekdays on TBS (channel 6 in Tokyo, host is Megumi Toshiaki). The news shows that start at 2 p.m. are also good for the latest info. On issues like the COVID-19, they dig deep into them, and discussions can go on for an hour. If your Japanese isn’t up to par, then these probably won’t help, unless you know a Japanese person who can summarize them for you.

  4. WHO and CDC websites are very good for information. Both are doing daily updates. New people are still getting infected each day in Japan.

    Keeping your hands clean seems to be more important than wearing a mask (the virus can move through the mask).

    Some Tokyo companies are starting to institute telework and/or flex time to allow people to avoid busy train stations.

    Considering the age demographics of Japan, where a large % of people are over 60, you’d think there’s be more communications from the gov’t. The mortality rate is significantly higher for people over 60.