What If A Covid-19 Wave 2 Happens During A Natural Disaster?

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It’s hard to think about a second wave of covid-19 infections when countries are still wrestling with Wave 1. We don’t even know if one will occur.

But history shows it’s a possibility we have to be on guard for. The Great Influenza of 1918 had three waves, with the second being by far the deadliest.

If covid-19 turns out to indeed have a second wave, will it be more deadly, too? No way to know at this time. But again, that’s a potential outcome we need to be aware of.

Yet one other important question we don’t have the answer (yet) to: If a second wave does occur, what would happen if the timing coincides with another crisis?

This question is timely, as most predictable natural disasters tend to happen in the second half of the year. And we’re entering that period now.

The east coast’s hurricane season runs June 1 through November 30. Already there have been four named storms (out of 13 to 19 predicted), and more hurricanes than normal are expected this year. Peak activity should happen between late August and early October:

hurricaneseasongraphics_7-2.jpg1862×1048 84.9 KB

In the west, fires have been getting worse for years; and this year’s season is predicted to be “above normal”:<img class=“aligncenter size-medium” src=“https://peakprosperity.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/month1_outlook-2.png” alt="“July 2020 US fire danger map” width=“1056” height=“816” />

And if Wave 2 were to hit in late winter/early Spring 2021, these are the US regions at greatest risk of experiencing floods during that time:

<img class=“aligncenter size-medium” src=“https://grist.files.wordpress.com/2019/03/noaa-map.jpg?w=1200” alt="“US flood risk map” width=“1200” height=“675” />

So, what would happen if a covid-19 Wave 2 requiring a serious lockdown gets disrupted by one or more of these natural disasters? Where hundreds of thousands to millions of people suddenly have to evacuate to parts unknown when a health quarantine is supposed to be in place?

The short answer is: Nothing good.

Evacuees will have to jettison much of their covid defense preparations in the scramble. And hygiene discipline around social distancing/etc will likely be seriously compromised as so many weary families arrive at locations unprepared for them. It’s hard to imagine how infections won’t skyrocket.

Ugh.

While there’s no way to predict with certainty when or even if this will happen, we can improve our individual odds for safety by planning today for such an outcome.

First, identify your bug-out destination should you be forced to relocate under these conditions. Contact the folks there now and game-plan with them what would happen if you had to show up there during a Wave 2. Would they be willing to welcome you? What would the pre-arranged safety protocols be while you stayed there? What resources would they depend on you to bring with you?

Second, prepare your bug-out checklist and make sure you maintain all needed supplies in reserve should you need to leave home in a hurry. If low, head out now to fill any gaps.

And third, make sure you’re as prepared as possible for successfully dealing with a second covid-19 wave.

A growing chorus of readers have been asking my co-founder Chris Martenson and me for a covid-19 Wave 2 prep guide that builds upon the recommendations made in the earlier guides we published back in February and March. Now that we’ve been through Wave 1, what new preparations would we emphasize?

Given the high degree of reader interest as well as our strong belief that the time to prepare for adversity is well before it arrives, we’ve just compiled our critical insights.

In Part 2: The Covid-19 Wave 2 Preparation Guide, Chris and I put on our Monday Morning quarterback helmets and reveal what we assess are the most important Wave 1 lessons to bring with us in anticipation of Wave 2.

Treatment protocols, meds, key supplies, food, money, social strategies – we detail out what everyone now needs to integrate into their future covid planning. The prudent move here is to hope for the best but prepare for the worst.

Click here to read Part 2 of this report (free executive summary, enrollment required for full access).

This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://peakprosperity.com/what-if-a-covid-19-wave-2-happens-during-a-natural-disaster/

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  1. make sure blood levels of zinc, vitamin D etc. are topped up
  2. Have cans and/or hermetically closed jars of dried grains and beans in a safe storage. Store hardy crops like cabbage, onions, pumpkins, patatoes etc. high and dry!
  3. Learn which wild plants are edible (many!) Wild plants can provide fresh nutrition 3 seasons per year, and provide many micro- nutrients.! In WW2 many folks died of starvation while their gardens were full of edible weeds!
  4. Use the best prophylaxis practical science can provide: HCQ and hopefully quercetin according to the India protocol. Ivermectin in standard dose 1x /year: These meds chould have already been taken, so no worry about forgetting/losing them in a possible disaster…
    It is early for the science to prove, but it seems as effective as a good vaccination!
     
     
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I have to definitely second what Rootman said about wild edibles. This can be such a huge thing, and not just in times of crisis. Deeply learning about the edible plants/trees growing in your region opens up a whole new world. You see the landscape in a different more intimate way. I’ve spent years studying this off and on, slowly deepening my knowledge. Now I can stand just about anywhere in my region and quickly identify several, if not many edibles within my line of sight.
When I go outside the bioregion I’m most familiar with I can usually still identify many edibles, but there is obviously much more I could learn to prepare for potential refugee status.
Right now one of my life projects is to become more familiar and comfortable harvesting, cooking, and eating the wide range of these foods lying around me free for the harvesting, generally having grown with zero gardening efforts on my part and being among the most nutritious foods I could be eating to top it all off. Mind you I still garden, but I’ve let many of my beds be taken over by “weeds” that provide more and better food without any effort on my part.
Wild edibles, when recognized, are tremendous life capital. They offer free food and excellent nutrition to support the life capital of your body, a great thing to know about in times of Covid, crisis, natural disasters, and just normal life!

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… a Carrington Event, which given our utter dependence on the Internet and high-tech electronics, would send humanity back to the Stone Age.
You think CoViD-19 has set us back? Imagine what our situation would be like if there were no Zoom meetings, no stay-at-home work, no electricity. There’s a fair chance that vehicles with computer-controlled engines would not function. And even if/when the electrical grid came back up, anything electronic that had been connected to it at the time of the event would be fried.
Through ice core data, scientists believe the Carrington Event was a once-in-500-year event. So it could happen any time in the next 400 years or so.

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What a missed opportunity for netflix to create an informed video series that would reach a large audience.
Has anyone else watched it? Some is ok…but they completely missed the issue of Daszak’s gain of function studies.
 

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David Huang said:
“Deeply learning about the edible plants/trees growing in your region opens up a whole new world. You see the landscape in a different more intimate way. I’ve spent years studying this off and on, slowly deepening my knowledge. Now I can stand just about anywhere in my region and quickly identify several, if not many edibles within my line of sight.”
This is the best piece of advice I have seen on this blogsite, (in addition to sandpuppies great medical thoughts).
David’s suggested activity is the main discipline/effort that the religion “Archdruidry” focuses on. This should be and actually is, a prime life focus for some very intelligent people who want to be in touch with reality (in contrast to living in a NYT/WSJ/WPost/MSNBC/CNN/FB matrix).
Some years ago a woman in my neighborhood wrote a book on the neighborhood local edibles. Such literary effort and reading such should be at the top of the list for things to do to prepare for the “new age” of darkness…
thanks David

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You are most welcome Mots. Your words make me think I really do need to make myself sit down sometime soon and write the blog post I’ve been planning about these sorts of things to hoping help inspire others to better prepare themselves, and even better, to see the bounty that likely surrounds them ignored by all but a few.

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David
Can you systematize this? Make a form to fill in as a tool to simplify for others? A table with categories of plants (and possibly animals) to fill in, including time of year for harvest, amounts of mass available, maybe a column with notes for how to cultivate… ?

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https://wildfoodadventures.com/about/john-kallas/wild-food-adventurer/wfa-by-volumeyear/euell-gibbons/
https://www.amazon.com/Euell-Gibbons-Handbook-Edible-Plants/dp/0915442787

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Mots, having all that systematized would be nice wouldn’t it. Alas, that is far from where I am with all this. Samual Thayer, whose books I link to in some of the blog posts I’m about to link in here does have charts giving times of year to harvest various plants. One of the blogs I need to write is a good review of his books. The short version is this, they are all exceptional, setting a whole new level of greatness in foraging books. If you are interested in really learning more about wild edibles you need all three of his books. I have found nothing else that comes close in terms of functionally useful info!
Blog posts of mine that might be of interest are these:
What’s for Dinner?
This one about a “snack cracker” I make that can use a ton of greens, including the abundance of wild greens often about. For example I mention plantain in the blog. Normally the long fibers in them make them less ideal as a potherb, but the crackers make this a moot point.
“Excellent Perennial Vegetables You can’t Buy in Stores” covers milkweed and daylilies both of which are in vast abundance at my place right now. I find them to be some of the most abundant wild foods for the longest period of time. So often it is just a narrow window of the year to harvest things. These I gather for months.
In this next blog post I write about an experiment to make stuffed milkweed pods.
For a common, but overlooked fruit, there is the Autumnberry harvested in the autumn. In this blog post I do have Samual Thayer’s books with links to find them on Amazon right up near the top of the post.
I don’t feel like any sort of expert in this. I’m just fumbling along trying to learn what is good to eat, and how to best harvest and prepare them. You will probably gather from how I write in the posts that I don’t see myself as any sort of authority on the matter. I’m not a master botanist, nor any sort of chef. In terms of the 8 forms of capital, this is where for most of us our cultural capital has failed us. We should have grown up learning how to identify, harvest, and eat the abundance of the lands around us, but our food cultures have instead been almost wholly captured by agribusiness so we know how to shop in grocery stores and order from restaurants instead. Our health, financial wealth, and ecosystems suffer as a result. The way I see it though, the only way a new food culture happens is by us relearning and rebuilding it ourselves, one by one, and sharing the info we learn along the way with others interested.

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…did you know that I AM EDIBLE, TOO?
It’s a fact, the natural crunch of Grape Nuts…reminds me of my toasted toenails!

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Purslane is an awesome succulent green. I’m loaded up this year from volunteers from last summer so I expect it will be self-perpetuating in my vegetable garden (which means some places it will be out of control, LOL). The wild variety is puny but the cultivars can have quite large leaves. Part of my daily salad.

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Lots of volunteers of the wild variety in my garden too. The wild variety doesn’t seem to take over. Do the cultivars?

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Lots of common weeds are generally more nutritious even then Kale and Spinach. Some take more effort to prepare and to develop a taste for than others:

  • Dandelion - whole plant - roots in the fall and early spring, greens during the growing season, flowers (battered and fried).
  • Plantain (young leaves)
  • Ground ivy or Gill over the ground - tips of trailing stems with leaves and or flowers. Hairy leaves. I don't have much experience with these -maybe make tea.
  • Yellow dock - young leaves and seed heads.
  • Violet - flowers and leaves They get tough and hairy after the flowering season ends, but before then, they can be eaten in large quantities with more satisfying results than perhaps any of the others listed here.
  • Pigweed and other others in the Chenopodium genus. Leaves - cooked or raw. Be careful some have glands that produce an irritating oil.
  • Watercress (look in smaller slow flowing streams).
  • Chickory (leaves and roots like dandelion).
Those are the more common ones in my area. Of course, there are wild berries. Around me the blackberries (ripe in the second half of July and first half of August are the easiest to harvest. Unfortunately, freezing brings out the seediness of the wild variety. Maybe jam strained to remove seeds is the better option. I planted raspberries perhaps 9 years ago. They feel wild to me because I just give them a quick pruning in february and blow the leaves from my lawn onto them with an occassional bit of compost or organic fertilizer. I get 10-15 gallons a season from those 30 original plants. For real calories, you'll need to go for nuts. Acorns are the easiest way to get lots of calories. Those of the White Oak family (rounded rather than pointed lobes on the leaves) are easiest to leach the tannins from. Shell them first and then immerse in flowing water in a cloth bag for a few days or in a big jar of water changed daily for several days or boil in 3-5 changes of water. They can then be dried, ground as needed into meal and used alone or mixed with corn meal or other flours. Hickory nuts are a lot of work to shell. I've never tried this, but I bet the native people around here had a good way to save labor by crushing and boiling the hickory nuts and then skimming the oil off the top.
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One thing I made the other day was a lazy man’s dolma mix. I say lazy because I didn’t really do the stuffed grape leaves. That takes time! Instead I went around the mounds of wild grape vines growing at my place and harvested a bunch of small, tender newly formed leaves. They would be too small for stuffing, but being the new leaf they were the most tender. In short order I had a lot of them. I combined them with some bronze fennel that is now “wild” in one of my garden beds. I planted some of this fennel a few years ago and it seems it’s perennial in my zone, even though I was technically on the edge of it being perennial. This plant seems to spread rapidly by seed too so I have a bunch growing now with no real effort from me beyond that original planting. Sometimes I weed the beds a bit, but not every year. My milkweed has the run of those beds too.
Anyway, I took the grape leaves and fennel and chopped it all up fine, added some other spices and cooked it with brown rice in my solar powered instapot. At first it was a bit blah, but with a bit more salt and letting it sit and mix flavors a bit it turned out pretty good. I’m going to have to try other variations using the grape leaves and rice as the base. If you’ve got wild or domestic grape vines around then odds are you have no shortage of their leaves available.
Another thing I’ll note, many have heard about wild carrots, often called Queen Anns lace. The root, ie. carrot, can be eaten but I’m often not impressed with them. Did you know you can eat carrot tops too? When the tops are shooting up in rapid growth is when they will be the best. The flowers are also edible. I find I don’t harvest many wild carrot roots, but I do eat the green tops growing around my yard. It’s one of those common plants I still tend to overlook though which I need to do much better at finding ways to use in my cooking. (Note of caution, Make ABSOLUTELY sure you know you have wild carrots and NOT, I repeat NOT water hemlock or poison hemlock which can look superficially like the wild carrot. Those are some of the most deadly plants around. A mouthful can kill you in minutes!!)

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Edible Wild Plants
A North American Field Guide to over 200 natural foods.
by Thomas Elias and Peter Dykeman
is an excellent book. Wild edibles are categorized by season, geographic availability and includes color pictures.

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Combine that with this App. Point, shoot, tells you what you’re looking at. Can’t tell you how much more I’ve learned!

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Do you treat your toenails for fungus before you eat them?
I’m also curious as to why you toast them - are they not crunchy enough as they are? It just seems like a superfluous use of electricity…

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Henbit and lambs quarters are excellent. Of course one of the earliest spring dishes is poke sallet. You have to boil it in three waters though. It is a great spring tonic. We have wild plums, black walnuts and hickory nuts. Hunting shrooms can yield delicious morels. In the Pac NW you can find all kinds of shrooms, American ginseng is a good find. https://www.google.com/search?sxsrf=ALeKk01eFWwi6k7wopL35DKn9wCpwVj0-A%3A1594077614856&ei=rrEDX4riM8b6sAW76r_QBA&q=best+american+ginseng+arkansas&oq=best+american+ginseng+arkansas&gs_lcp=CgZwc3ktYWIQAzIFCAAQzQIyBQgAEM0CMgUIABDNAjIFCAAQzQIyBQgAEM0COgQIABBHOgIIADoGCAAQFhAeOggIIRAWEB0QHlCYd1jZmgFgpKABaABwAXgAgAGJAogBrAiSAQU1LjMuMZgBAKABAaoBB2d3cy13aXo&sclient=psy-ab&ved=0ahUKEwiK8ejv4bnqAhVGPawKHTv1D0oQ4dUDCAw&uact=5#kpvalbx=_L7MDX-2mEMa4sQXk3a64Bw6
Wild onions and garlic along with wild strawberries are good finds right in the yard. I have a lot of wild cherry trees and they are good to munch on in the garden.
Of course for those so inclined there are lots of psychotropics like datura but I was much older then.

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You can make a pot to boil things with out of paper.