In the even that the virus got loose mandatory isolation and martial law might be the only thing that could quickly shut it down. Living on rations and water for possibly 45 days in exchange for civilization would be a small price to pay.
I have to say that I didn’t think of utility workers, but would they be exposed to the public all that much? There are many jobs which have no exposure to anyone IRL. A lot of stocking in grocery stores is done at night/after hours. Those, I think, will keep going.
We agree about the minimum wage worker who has absolutely no incentive to show up for work in a serious epidemic. However, with the economy the way it is, will people jeopardize even their McD/Walmart job?
What I think could play out badly are agribusiness jobs. Let’s say you have a chicken house of 5 week old birds, and the processing plant calls and says, “No one showed up for work today, and everyone is calling out for tomorrow. Hold the shipment.” OK, the grower now loses money because he’s feeding with little weight gain of the chickens to compensate. But if, for example, your market tomatoes are ripe, what do you do? Odds are that there’s no processor nearby to can them, and if there was, they likely would have to alter processes so much to accommodate your Beefsteaks that they wouldn’t be accepted. Those tomatoes aren’t going anywhere. If you’re lucky, a local church might glean them. The economic losses could be staggering.
In a major pandemic that is easily spread and has a high death rate, not ebola but some other thing, the movement around the country will need to be stopped.
Trucking in particular would be a major vector. A guy picks up a load of product in Tennessee one day and is in Chicago 2 days later. Were the people who loaded the truck infected? How about the products? Are they safe or in need of decontamination? And the truck driver, who and how many people has he been in contact with during his travels?
The shelf stockers that No umlaut for U says have little contact with people, actually have a great deal of contact with products from all over the world.
We live in a ‘just in time’ supply system and any epidemic that stops transportation of goods will starve out the cities in only a week or so. The wonders of computerized inventory control and distribution management will quickly fall apart if travel and transportation need to be curtailed. There just are not enough resources of anything locally stored where you are.
It’s a scary thought. But it is often seen in areas where a hurricane is about to hit, the store shelves are quickly emptied. Think about this effect on a larger scale without outside resupply and it gets apocalyptic very fast.
Hmmm…I see some potential for SimCity-Pandemic Edition - where players try to contain outbreaks in various ways
The proper response would depend very much on the factual details: how does the virus spread, and why is it an epidemic? We can’t solve the problem with too many unknown variables, and it’s rather silly to speculate in the absence of facts.
This exactly why we have the CDC. If the response to every situation was the same, we’d just have an instruction manual. But diseases aren’t that simple, so we need a staff of highly trained scientists and public health experts.
It’s silly to think we can do their very difficult, very technical job in our armchairs. While we’re at it, we might as well also design an economically viable fusion reactor.
It’s stilly to think we can do their very difficult, very technical job when *they *can’t. I have to admit, much of my “calmmongering” around this whole issue was indeed predicated on the notion that the CDC and hospital administrators did not in fact have their heads up their ass. I know somewhere within the last two months, I posted a link to the CDC recommended protocol for ebola precautions, and it clearly said Droplet precautions sufficed. That was nonsense, as we now know, and people who have been fighting this thing for decades in Africa must have enjoyed a good giggle about that while putting on the hazmat suits.
But, hey, it’s Saturday, the race is on, I gots internet and nothin’ better to talk about…