As I spend time writ­ing this post, I am on a plane watch­ing the film Con­ti­gion . If you have not seen it, it’s a film about a pan­dem­ic that start­ed and begins to be wide­ly spread by those trav­el­ing. As the film pro­gress­es, it is found that the pan­dem­ic is a deeply dead­ly virus. The CDC gets involved after a hand­ful of coin­ci­den­tal deaths around the globe. Matt Damon stars in it as some­one who’s wife and step­son dies, and he is put in iso­la­tion. As you can imag­ine, the pan­dem­ic beings to slow­ly spi­der­web across the globe. As I watched, I real­ized I had to write a post as I was watch­ing it. The film seems eeri­ly real­is­tic, and frankly seems like an awak­en­ing of sorts for me (again) in this area.

That said, I trav­el quite a bit for work. Watch­ing this film and know­ing how I trav­el and the germs I get exposed to, I often laugh and say I am immune to the com­mon cold and the flu. How­ev­er, assum­ing that some­thing was weaponized (alleged­ly). Or assum­ing it is a mutat­ed ver­sion of some­thing like H1N1 that I come in con­tact with I could car­ry it to and from place to place. Not to men­tion, pick it up and poten­tial­ly become infect­ed myself to who knows what end.

This film chron­i­cles flash mobs for pseu­do cures in phar­ma­cy’s, as well as loot­ing, and runs on gro­cery stores, etc. State bor­ders were sealed off and in this case Illi­nois was quar­an­tined. No one was allowed into the state or out. I think a lot of research went into this film.

The CDC / DHS sug­gest­ed, in the film, that casi­no’s are a point where some­thing can spread rapid­ly. I can attest to this, because I once left Las Vegas with pink eye after spend­ing a bit of time at a casi­no. Research online has shown that it was an epi­dem­ic while I was there when I checked online after return­ing home. In addi­tion, anoth­er time I was in Las Vegas a casi­no had an out­break of Legion­naires dis­ease. Casi­no’s are a cesspool of dis­ease. Just do the research online for your­self.

This film, per­son­al­ly speak­ing, is a must see as I believe it might actu­al­ly dic­tate in a slight­ly real­is­tic fash­ion what may hap­pen from a CDC / World Health Orga­ni­za­tion per­spec­tive and “busi­ness process” to find­ing the answers that may take to save lives or pre­vent dis­as­ter. My point, is that it is a slow process, and slow process­es can be a real issue for the pub­lic.

Sta­tis­tic, from the film, of course: The aver­age per­son touch­es their face an aver­age of 3,000 times a day. You can imag­ine after hear­ing that I was very con­scious of touch­ing my face.

It makes those Jesse Ven­tu­ra con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries about the plas­tic coffin’s stacked up in wait­ing a lit­tle sur­re­al.

I real­ize I keep touch­ing my face. So weird. The woman two seats across from me (a very nice woman from France trav­el­ing to LA) is sick, and this seems a lit­tle weird.

This brings me to the thought of not just pur­chas­ing N95 masks , but to get back on the band-wag­on and and get the NBC gear I have been putting off buy­ing. I have been look­ing at NBC gear for some time. It is some­thing that, while I have been putting off, pri­mar­i­ly because I am an apart­ment dweller, and more gear takes up space. Aside from the gear, it is time to buy plas­tic sheet­ing and more rolls of duct tape to seal off win­dows and doors for a bug in peri­od, how­ev­er long that needs to be. All the more rea­son to con­tin­ue prep­ping and adding to food preps . If there is a bug in peri­od every­one will need enough water and food to sus­tain you and your fam­i­ly with­out going out­side.

I keep touch­ing my face.

What the film showed, and oth­er films like it that I have seen in the past, is that a pan­dem­ic, while it starts with one per­son is quick­ly passed from per­son to per­son and the dis­ease exchange hap­pens expo­nen­tial­ly. This is poten­tial­ly most dead­ly. A vac­ci­na­tion, it pro­duced quick­ly, could still take months to get to inoc­u­la­tion of the sick. Mil­lions of deaths will con­tin­ue to occur until that time. Iso­lat­ing your­self from a virus (and the peo­ple infect­ed with it), could be the eas­i­est way to save your­self from the worst. All the more rea­son for me to buy that plas­tic sheet­ing and duct tape…

I touched my face again.

And again.

It’s time to kick the food and water stor­age up as well. It seems to me that it could take min­i­mum, nine to 12 months just to pro­vide a vac­cine to a pop­u­la­tion. Min­i­mum.

How many of you are pre­pared or prepar­ing specif­i­cal­ly for a pan­dem­ic? What have you done to pre­pare? Please let me know. I would be inter­est­ed in learn­ing what you know as well…