What I Did To Prep This Week: Mar 15th – 21st 2020
Hello Pack, hope you all are well and did not get trampled among the marauding hordes of the unprepared at the local Walmart. Maybe, just maybe, the panicked run on toilet paper, food, rubbing alcohol, hand sanitizer, and diapers will actually prompt some positive results in the long run.
The unprepared now – for the first time, realize just how truly unprepared they are and get a little insight into both how quickly life as we know it can change drastically, and what society turned on its head will actually look like in terms of good availability.
The unfortunate flip side of the panicked buying by the unprepared hordes is that store shelves were emptied out of goods and food so quickly… many had to do without and the rest of use will have to dip into stockpiles for simple weekly grocery and personal care item needs.
There is not currently a single package of toilet paper left in my county. No rubbing alcohol. No hand sanitizer. No diapers. No baby food.
I make my own hand sanitizer using only potent natural ingredients, but I still looked for the hand sanitizer on store shelves just to see if there was any left or if all of the panic buying had finished off local stock.
I read an article over the weekend that included two men who did not know each other but were both Amazon affiliate sellers, one from Ohio and the other from Pennsylvania.
They both purchased 10,000 bottles of hand sanitizer in the Buckeye State to resell at the online store.
The Pennsylvania man had his account suspended for pandemic price gouging and got stuck with a lot of the product – after marking it up to $20 a bottle in some cases.
The Ohio man sold all of his for vastly inflated prices but not such a substantial mark up and made between $27,000 to $45,000 on the panic of the unprepared.
The only state in the union that does not have any cases of Coronavirus is West Virginia – at least as of this writing. The governor believes that it’s because the flu style virus swept through his state about a month ago.
That makes sense. Here in southern Ohio I know three people who experienced the exact same symptoms that our neighbors in West Virginia did, they thought they had some kind of “weird flu” and were diagnosed largely with either the flu, pneumonia, or bronchitis.
Maybe it has already been through my county. It is so hard to tell because otherwise healthy folks below the age of 70 can get through the illness without medical intervention.
Our governor, Mike DeWine, has gone over the top with precautions when only 26 known cases exist. Until two cases were found in Columbus, all the other cases were a three to four hour drive from my county but our schools, restaurants, and bars were ordered closed.
I have heard there is a recall effort now underway with strong support from a traditionally Republican county for a GOP governor.
Thankfully our school is going to deliver meals to the communities where school buildings used to exist in the county and open the doors for meals at some centrally located existing buildings.
So many of the kids in our region rely on the free and reduced breakfast and lunch at school, and on the weekly “backpack” snacks sent home with them for the weekend.
Don’t get me started on standing in line at the grocery store digging out coupons, and looking at the sale flyer to stretch our money as far as it can go while watching someone on taxpayer funded assistance fill up the card with junk food, pop, and high priced items instead of value ones of the same nutritional value and size.
A card like that will run out long before the end of the month and leave their children hungry.
The mainstream media has forgotten all about their latest “Russia, Russia, Russia” attempt to take down our president, and are knee-deep in the blame game of his response to the pandemic.
He shut down flights from infected areas quickly, something that Obama refused to do during Ebola, and told us not to panic, how to avoid getting sick, and reassured us that this too will pass while connecting with the CDC, and giving those experts free reign to do what needs to be done. How in the world could even the liberal talking heads have a problem with such actions?
In other non-pandemic news from our survival homestead this week, we purchased more ducklings and banty hens, are selling the heck out of free range farm fresh duck eggs, and getting our hayfield ready for the growing season.
Over the weekend we canned multiple gallons of bean soup, vacuum sealed sugar, salt, flour, and diatomaceous earth in Mason jars, and got more firewood in.
This Week’s Questions:
- How are grocery store shelves looking where you live?
- Are folks helping one another like they are in my rural county, or getting into near fist fights like some news coverage of city grocery stores has shown on television?
- Now that we are technically in the middle of a pandemic, how are your preps stacking up?
- What do you think of your governor’s and President Trump’s pandemic response?
- What did you do to prep this week?