I have responded before because dealing with a pandemic is way outside my experience.
Unfortunately for me, I come into contact with vast amounts of people in the course of my job. Also my immediate family lives in the State Capital City which has the history of first being hit with the new flu strains that hit Australia. Our hospital system down here is not the best for keeping up with day to day let alone something major.
So I'm not going to be in the best situation if the pendemic does eventuate.
A pandemic can hit from any virus that does make the right mutation, not just this one. There has been numerous attempts over the years to warn everyone of that.
I cant give much towards preparing for this kind of disaster, apart from common sense answers and there are others that can give far greater input to this here than me.
I can give answers and opinions to subjects that I am farmiliar with, or I can respond to ideas you might have on this subject.
My guess is there are others here that are like me and read the flu related threads and leave the comments up to others that have more experience/knowledge to answer.