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Oh, don't worry. The virus probably won't kill you. Your stupid behavior, however...

"It's just the flu."  Well, it's a virus.  So it's sort of like the flu, the way people are sort of like penguins because both are animals.  In actuality, at its mildest, it's "just" a common cold.  However, you might want to ask the post-Columbian Americans about unique strains of the common cold. At its worst, it's severe pneumonia. It's also very infectious with few obvious symptoms during the transmission stage. But it is not the flu, anymore than I'm an Adelie.

"ZOMG WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE!"  No, we're not. You're an idiot.

"Nothing is going to happen. It's just the flu." See above. You're also an idiot.

"The government now has complete control of the health care industry, colleges, and all public venues!" Not all of them, but they had control of most of them for a long time. We tried to warn you. And if you don't want to live in a nation of laws, why don't you go live in Somalia?

"I didn't want the government to have control of my life. This is why we need socialism!"  Please just kill yourself right now. You are a worthless failure.

"It's no big deal, it only kills old people."  Yeah, screw Grandma. No one likes her anyway. Are you actually listening to yourself?

"The rich elites are drinking brandy and laughing at how they manipulated us."  Right, because destroying a chunk of their own worth with the shutdowns is HILARIOUS. And what rich people do, apparently.  That's how they got rich.

"Does anyone actually KNOW anyone who's sick with this 'virus'?"  Yes.  And let's refresh prehistory for millennials (anything before 1970): the Spanish Flu in 1918 killed 50 million people.  By responding to this EARLY, we prevent that.  You don't wait for zombies to swarm outside your door before planning to react to it. Well, not if you have the brains the zombies crave.

"When it's all over, you'll feel stupid."  Right. Remember Y2K?  One pack of idiots insisted cars would stop running because they didn't know what date it was. Another pack insisted nothing at all would happen, dates didn't matter. In between, a few thousand IT people went through everything that might be affected by a date irregularity and hardened it. It was "nothing" because we planned ahead.  Hopefully, proper prior planning preventing piss poor performance, this will be "nothing." Which doesn't mean it couldn't be as bad as the Spanish Flu.

Oh, yeah-referencing Wuhan is just that: a reference to this particular strain and its Patient 0 point.  It's not "Racist" to say "it came from China." Claiming they INVENTED IT would be racist, but it provably came from there.

No, it doesn't matter what the demographic makeup of the President's advisory council as, AS LONG AS THEY ARE THE BEST PEOPLE FOR THE JOB.

Ironically, we actually have probably the ideal president for this particular issue. Trump the businessman was able to explain to banks, medical firms, megacorps how the short term loss of taking it on the chin for the consumer is longterm goodwill and economic recovery.  Zer0 the Fuckup couldn't have grasped the terms, much less explained them.  Nor could Shrillery the Hildebeest. And as for Bernie, socialists are incapable of grasping economics or they wouldn't be socialists.

"OMG! How are we supposed to plan for this?"  The same way you plan for anything. There's always an Arquillian Battle Cruiser, or a Corillian Death Ray, or an intergalactic plague that is about to wipe out all life on this miserable little planet.  What was the other lesson in that other movie?  DON'T PANIC.

You don't need to make Milk Sandwiches. Why do you buy a dozen of each during EVERY event?  I was on my way to get a loaf of bread that lasts me a month. Well, not this time.  Luckily, we know how to make bread, suckers.

Look, if you buy your TP in bulk and restock as it gets low, you never need to worry about this. Besides, there's lots of copies of the NYT, USA Today, Dianetics, and Fifty Shades books available cheap. You're not going to run out of toilet paper.

Buy a few extra cans of food every week and rotate them through your stocks--just get a whole flat of something once a week. Potatoes. Vegetables. Soup. Tomato sauce. Chicken. Tuna.  Beef stew. Pretty soon, you have a month's worth of food on hand. Not thrilling, but edible. Same with dry goods like noodles, sealed crackers, peanut butter in large jars, etc.

I'm sitting here with 50 odd rolls of TP, several hundred cans of food, 3 deep freezes of animal corpses (from our livestock and the store, including about 50 lbs of bacon and 10 of salmon), shelves atop them loaded with MREs, crates of our own freeze dried meals, and a pantry full of dry goods. The zombies will be eaten by bugs and carrion eaters before we run short.  If you just approach it methodically, it's very attainable even on a tight budget.

Then you can join me as I walk through the store and snicker at the rubes.

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