Exactly. You can be prepared and be wrong every time and be okay. You can ignore preparations just once and that's the end of you and your family.

I am not sure why people are so reluctant to see the risk asymmetry in this.

Canned food lasts forever too. Just get a huge supply and slowly eat/replace it for some meals.

Yes, you should be prepared for things like pandemics, because it is not that difficult to have a small amount of preparation. But if you are not in China, you have no reason to prepare for coronavirus specifically. Saying things like "the flu is more dangerous" seems like a perfectly reasonable line of thinking - if you are in North America you should not be preparing for coronavirus any more than you already do for things like the flu. If you do not feel prepared for a coronavirus outbreak, it just means your preparation for the far more serious existing threats was lacking.

> But if you are not in China, you have no reason to prepare for coronavirus specifically.

Tell that to people in Italy or South Korea.

I think you are underestimating how quickly things can change. At this time, I really believe the best time to prepare for the Coronavirus is now while other people aren't paying that much attention.

It will become more difficult to stock up if it becomes apparent to the masses that they need to prepare.

Having a cabinet of canned food is good policy even without a potential pandemic to worry about.

> Best case, you can have a canned food party once this clears

Also frozen food. Even in worst case scenarios it's hard to see the grid going down for long periods, assuming raw coal/gas can keep arriving or your country has a lot of renewable energy.

What's the maximum time the grid can go down until the frozen food is unthawed/inedible? 1 Day or less probably?

4 days after a tornado, the food in our chest freezer was still half frozen. We cooked up a good fraction of it and tossed the rest. But only because refreezing it would have caused freezer burn. In an emergency, freezer burnt food is better than no food.

The key was that we never opened the freezer while power was out. Regularly opening an unplugged freezer would have melted things a lot faster. Chest freezers also do much better than fridge freezers.

Thank you very much, was really not sure how long a frozen but unplugged freezer would last.

The bigger the freezer, and the more full of frozen stuff, the longer it will last. Bigger freezer because the volume to surface area ratio is larger, and more full because there's just more thermal mass at a low temperature to buffer any heat leaking in.

Let's say 12 hours? I've had it last longer than that but in the scenario I'm thinking about there would be rolling blackouts on the order of hours, not days.

1-2 weeks? That seems dangerously optimistic to me.

Yes. But more than that and you run into space issues. FWIW, Mormons are experts at having enough for a full year for a family that might be 12 members, but they have special things they get like gallon sized cans of unground wheatberries, for making flour by grinding it.

US Government is currently recommending citizens have enough food and water for 2 weeks for every member: https://www.ready.gov/pandemic

This isn't a new page it's their advice for being prepared in general for a pandemic.

Here's a similar page put together by the CDC: https://cchealth.org/pandemic-flu/pdf/individuals_and_famili...

> FWIW, Mormons are experts at having enough for a full year for a family that might be 12 members, but they have special things they get like gallon sized cans of unground wheatberries, for making flour by grinding it.

Latter-day Saint here. This indeed was a teaching of the Church for quite some time, not so much anymore as it has shifted to general emergency preparedness [1][2][3][etc]. Some indeed still keep decent food stores though, we can order cases of #10 cans for varying things from the Church online [4] (the general public can too).

Some people keep a lot of freeze dried stuff, some can their excess that they grow, others just keep a lot of staples on hand that they rotate through. Personally I can feed myself for a few months on freeze dried stuff and 10-30 year canned staples then another 1-2 months on stuff I rotate through and eat daily (beans, oats).

[1] - https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/gospel-topi...

[2] - https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/article/preparednes...

[3] - https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/church/news/church-annou...

[4] - https://store.churchofjesuschrist.org/ click all categories, food storage (direct linking to the page will often generate errors)

The average American adult has a good 40+ days with of food stored in body fat.

Americans are well prepared... Even if they haven't tried to be.