In other threads people were talking about pandemics and how there could be lockdowns (people confined to their homes, not allowed to leave their houses).
However some people are going to have to leave to perform necessary jobs. What jobs would those be?
I’d assume jobs in
Healthcare (at least some kinds of healthcare. Physical therapists or optometrists would stay home but physicians, nurses, etc would still be at work).
Law and order
Transportation (trucking in food and consumables)
Agriculture
Maintaining the electrical grid
Food delivery (I assume food would be delivered to people’s doorsteps rather than people going to stores).
I’m guessing this has all been written down and codified by groups like the CDC, but if there is some highly contagious pandemic with a high mortality rate, wouldn’t people be confined to their homes and whatever goods they need be delivered to their door by trained people?
Those might all be essential but not all would be able to move freely. that’s just a guess on my part. Agriculture, as in the farmers themselves, might stay put.
Good guesses though. I wouldn’t have thought of “maintaining the electrical grid”
I think many essential people could be [del]forced[/del] encouraged to be quarantined at work. Especially if not exposed yet.
Medical staffs, power plants, LEO, Fire dept, 1st responder, assisted living / nursing homes. My wife works assisted living home and has spent a few nights staying at work during extreme weather conditions. Not safe for anyone to come in.
The feds have contingency plans for practically everything, but those plans only involve the relevant feds. I was involved in active planning years ago when the bird flu scare out of Southeast Asia was a real possibility. Any involvement with private enterprise would be to maintain law and order and curtail the population, i.e., use of the military and the national guard, in cooperation with local law enforcement.
However, the recent government shutdown has been a real clusterfuck across the board. The media will never do a story about it, either. If there is any lesson to learn from this short shudown is if we had a pandemic in this country tomorrow, we couldn’t handle it.
No we are doomed if the shit hits the fan. Be ready to bug-out peeps. I live at my bug-out place, so don’t come here. I have too many kids and grand-kids, my resources won’t go far.
Seriously, America has dealt with emergencies and epidemics in the past, it may be chaotic and scary. We can only do what we can do. A certain number of people will die. Those left living will do the best they can.
Depends on circumstances. Alternatives include refrigeration to hold backlog of bodies, or cremation.
You’d still need people to collect the bodies and move them to storage/burial/cremation. Somebody has to drive the cart and yell “Bring out your dead!”
Food delivery is an interesting issue - I’m sure many in my area would be surprised that the store I work for, which does most of its business in groceries, does not have paid sick time for employees. That’s right, the people putting fruit and vegetables on the shelves have no paid sick time. Couldn’t possibly be a problem, right?
According to the Pan American Health Organization, essential services include:
• Executive governance (the mayor, for example, in a city)
• Healthcare
• Fire and police protection
• Provision of clean water
• Basic sanitation, including sewage and garbage removal
• Maintenance of communication infrastructure (e.g., telephone system, radio, internet)
• Maintenance of utilities (e.g., gas and electricity)
• Provision of food and other essential goods (see below)
• Transportation
• Road maintenance/repair
• Banking
• Payroll departments
• Tax collection
I started the flu epidemic thread in IMHO, want to throw in that when the 1918 Spanish flu hit Philly roughly 75% of healthcare workers were elsewhere, serving in the military/providing civilian support for the troops.
Obviously, these are mission-critical folk.
I think animal care workers are essential. When farmer families die, the livestock need to be fed and milked. In my perfect world workers would go door-to-door and rescue pets whose owners were dying/dead.
I personally disagree that animal care workers are essential in a survival situation. My reasoning is that meat is more of a luxury, while staple crops (rice, wheat, corn, soybeans, etc) are an essential.
Keeping the cornfields, wheat fields, rice paddies, soybean fields, etc. up and running is essential since without that people will starve. But things like ensuring there are meat, fruits or vegetables is more of a luxury (micronutrients from fruits & vegetables could be met with vitamins) isn’t as important. People won’t starve from not having meat, and as long as they have synthetic vitamins they won’t suffer from nutritional deficiencies, so a varied diet becomes less important.
Part of me wonders if in a true survival situation, the government just drops off 50 pound bags of corn meal, flour, wheat, sugar, etc. on people’s doorsteps so they have enough food for a month.
In a survival situation, they may just butcher the animals for meat when the farmers die rather than exert the effort to keep them alive for milk or until they are fully grown.
Prisons & jails are still going to need to be staffed, though probably at minimum levels with the inmates basically on lockdown. No visitation except for clergy and legal counsel. The court-system itself would keep functioning in some capacity; even if it involves ad-hoc military tribunals.
Well before it gets to the point were repurposed garbage trucks are going around announcing body pickups on loudspeakers there’d be an period where funeral homes were stretched to the limit providing normal individual burials and cremations; albeit without viewings or actual funerals. Or the government could just start broadcasting PSAs about how to use bedsheets as shrouds and bury you own dead in shallow grave in the yard for the time being (ala Protect and Survive.)
BTW I have had the “pleasure” of working retail for a company that neither provided us with paid sick time or health insurance yet saw fit to put out reminders that if we were sick the responsible thing to so would be to stay home so we don’t infect others. :rolleyes: And yes, I showed up for work sick & contagious without a second thought.
:dubious: Really, the government is still going to have to pay for everything that isn’t shut down.
Back when I did vaccine production, I did once look up the priority list for who would get priority vaccination in case of a pandemic.
As far as I remember, the list went
Healthcare workers, including the people who make and distribute the vaccine
Essential infrastructure workers, such as police, transport, electricity workers etc.
Especially vulnerable people, such as elderly etc.
Everyone else, including politicians.
Whether the last would have been the case in actual practice I am not sure of. I never got the impression that politicians thought of it as something that might actually happen.
In a quarantine you won’t be allowed to “bug out”, that’s the point. If everyone in an infected city is jumping in their car and heading out guess what happens?