I am thinking, based on what the CDC & WHO are stating, that it is now time to make anew evaluation of the Ebola situation.

I think it is time to update preps for a pandemic.

1. Food and water supplies, N95 or N100 (better) (or gas) masks, gloves (nitrile, vinyl, or latex), rain gear (slicker suit), duct tape, extra meds, extra consumables of all kinds, Chlorox bleach.

2. Curtailment of travel via commercial transportation (especially aircraft & air terminals).

3. Perhaps it is time to avoid events where large groups of people attend (sports arenas, festivals, public govt meetings, etc.

4. Time to make plans to homeschool one's children?

I'd like to hear everyone's thoughts on when such precautions would be prudent to put into action in order to minimize potential infection of one's family unit. What triggers would one look for?

Here are my thoughts "by the numbers"

#1: "Stock up"; now is the time. If there is a domestic outbreak, these things will disappear.

#2: Curtail travel, especially international. I would do this now also. I mentioned in this tread earlier my concerns/experiences during my mid-August trip to/from Eastern Europe. International Air Terminals are mixing bowls for the world's population. You usually can't control who is standing or sitting next to you (and coughing). Don't go unless you have to.

#3: Public Gatherings: Right now, I think a judgment call based on where you live. Big cities, maybe not; small rural town, much less concern.

#4: Plan to Home School; good idea to do the planning now. When to start the home schooling will need to be driven by local developments. School size and location (e.g. big city school vs. small town school) would play a big part.

And I would also suggest implementing frequent hand washing/sanitizing and, if possible, a no handshaking policy.

I hadn't thought about a no handshaking policy. At this time I think it would be a good idea to start getting in the groove and start putting that idea out to others as well.

I'm flying (domestic) tomorrow. I really have no concern about Ebola or pandemic flu from tomorrow's travels. I did get a flu shot, but that wasn't about flying, it was about getting my doctor off my case about it.

If some pandemic comes to the US, my family will be in very good shape for a couple of weeks, possibly a month. If utilities stay operable possibly far longer.

Now that the President has committed 3,000 military personnel to help contain Ebola in West Africa, it's possible we will hear about more Americans becoming infected and Ebola becoming more visible in the news (not to take anything away from any of the foreigners already on the ground there who deserve a lot of credit). I'm assuming that any service members infected over there will be airlifted back to the US.

It will be interesting to see how the military performs because this is a unique mission. The US military has plenty of experience with humanitarian missions and moving personnel and materiel long distances, but now we're combining that with an almost biowarfare aspect to everything they do over there. Security might become an issue as the epidemic spreads and the fear level rises, and you need security forces that can perform while being protected from infection. Paper surgical masks just aren't going to cut it in this case.

Although it would be wonderful if we had a civilian response rather than a military one, the US military is probably the only organization that could do all of this on such a scale on short notice. I just don't see the UN or WHO being able to organize and recruit a similar roster and size of civilian people and assets for such a difficult working environment in a similar time frame. And which would remain on the ground for an extended length of time necessary to try and slow or halt the spread.

Sierra Leone has just completed a three day lockdown of the entire country over the weekend in an attempt to slow down the spread of Ebola. No one except authorized personnel were allowed out on the street during this time.

Teams of healthcare workers and volunteers attempted to visit every household, to educate them about the disease, look for more people with Ebola or for bodies that need proper burial, and to pass out some basic hygiene supplies. The government claims that 80% of households were contacted.

Not sure if we'll ever really know if the lockdown had any real effect on the spread but we may know in the coming weeks. I can't imagine the entire US experiencing something similar, although I could imagine a lockdown happening at the local level here if people or politicians ever became scared enough to demand such drastic measures.

Anyway, a real life example of another reason to be able to survive for at least 72 hours without any outside help. The government did give the people advanced warning of the lockdown, like warning the public about a hurricane coming. However, markets there are already very low on supplies due to the disruption already caused by the disease. And people are very poor and prices are very high for what is still available, so this lockdown was very difficult to comply with for many people.

In other news, US military personnel have started arriving in Monrovia, the capital of Liberia. Liberia is the country most in need of help dealing with the outbreak. Some infectious disease experts say the outbreak is basically out of control within Liberia so this military effort may mostly be seen as damage control rather than an effective effort to actually halt the epidemic there. Ebola outbreaks tend to subside on their own, and not because of human intervention, unfortunately.

Supposedly the US military personnel there right now will not have any direct patient contact, but once you're in the hot zone, it's pretty hard to be confident that you won't have any second-hand exposure to the disease if you're there to train local healthcare workers. We'll see how the people back home react if service members start contracting the disease.

I would tend to treat the Ebola Outbreak as potentially the equivalent to the medieval Black Death. There is lots of information on how the Black Death spread and its effects.
The current Ebola out break appears to have an incubation time of around 3-6 weeks and the rate of eventual death is around 70% with an airborne vector. If isolation from the vector is a means of protection or survival from the Ebola virus then this would probably require 6 months to a year in a very isolated region of the world.
I would begin to look into the kit and stores requirements of early Antarctic expeditions for your preps. Then find a really inhospitable location (mountainous and sub arctic regions) where the unprepared would have difficulty surviving for a few days.

It may also prove difficult escaping quarantined areas such as high density populations. EOs have apparently already been signed where those with the Ebola infection can be disappeared.

The US military in these West African Countries are not there for Medical needs but for Security requirements as the secondary effects of the Ebola virus take hold in the break down of civil law and order, where the local security forces may begin to refuse to carry out the required public order shootings. i.e.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwKSJQI3tco

I travel frequently. If Ebola goes airborne, the biggest thing you have to fear is not catching Ebola, it's global economic collapse and the attendant hardships that come with that.

Here's why. In Western societies, for the most part, we get the idea behind germs and airborne transmission of disease, so we can and will take radical steps to prevent transmission to the degree we can. We have better science, infrastructure, communications and (to a degree) a population with a better understanding of disease prevention (well maybe not the anti-vax crowd, but like the Shakers, that's a self-limiting population).

But one of the necessary radical steps needed may be to shut down virtually all international travel for a period of time ranging from weeks to months to allow the virus to "burn out" where it is strongest. That would be bad in the short term. Very bad.

Consider that just a few days of European air travel closure from the volcanic eruptions was enough to roil global markets. Now consider more than a regional shutdown of transport, imagine a nearly global shutdown. This would certainly push the world into a depression, or at least a severe recession. Interestingly, the United States, with our newfound energy independence, would likely not suffer as much as other places, if for some reason we had to cut off incoming oil tankers, but then again, it's not as hard to isolate a crew of an oil tanker as it is to isolate the passengers of an Airbus A340-600. In the United States, we are, for the most part, independent for the things we need (energy, food, water, beer) and highly dependent on China and other countries for the things we want (cheap electronics, clothing, Pokemon cards and so on).

I'm not worried about North America in all of this, I am worried about the 4th world - the parts of the world where young, uneducated, and underemployed people are accumulating in vast numbers without much in the way of economic prospects or political power. These are people who can (and are) easily swayed into violent means of attaining what feels like power and direction, and charismatic leaders emerge in crisis to leverage their cult of personality to attain their own vision of how the world should work - from IS to Boku Haram, the flavor of the 2000's is radical Islamists stepping in to provide what feels like social order, economic stability and, most of all, power to a powerless class.

Ebola may, along with wiping out thousands of people, wipe out the remains of the semblance of progress towards a pluralistic, secular democratic culture that had been attained in West Africa and the Middle East during the cold war and slightly beyond.

As an aside: remember that Iran was once pretty much like Austin Texas (OK, with a dictator running things...but....)

http://www.pagef30.com/2009/04/iran-in-1970s-before-islamic-revolution.html

So my concern isn't about the disease itself, I'm convinced that it can be contained to a great degree to the parts of the world where ignorance and fear allow it to thrive. I'm concerned about the socio-political effects of the disease and the tactics needed to contain it.

It is possible - with today's technology - to scan the temperature of people as they enter a building. Be assured that this technology WILL be deployed rapidly if needed.

The customs halls coming into the USA are mind-blowingly poorly thought out. Basically, no matter where you're coming from, you go into this one vast room, stand in line for a long time staring at the walls (because you're not allowed to use your phone for some insane reason) and all around you are people who have come from everywhere. There's no air curtains to keep whatever's in there in there, there's no protocols for presorting people into groups from "high risk" areas into a semi-isolated area, there's zero in the way of medical staff, there's no hand sanitizer available, the fingerprint machines are sort of cleaned between each use, but not really that well. It's not a great thing.