Steve Conlee always had a habit of collecting reserves of food, water and other essentials at his home in case of the unknown. Now his Salt Lake City-based preparedness company, Emergency Essentials, is riding a rise in people across the United States looking to buy stashes of items such as water filters, face masks and stores of food amid fears over how far the coronavirus outbreak could go.

“The coronavirus has definitely sparked a huge demand across the board for companies like ours,” Conlee said. “We suspect this will be a longer-term demand spike, as opposed to something like hurricanes,” when demand rises for just a few weeks.

The preparedness industry, which targets a contingent often called “preppers,” markets the goods and advice needed to survive anything from a tornado to a quarantine to a full-blown apocalypse.

There are different subsets within the community, said Conlee. He’s part of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, colloquially called Mormons, among whom a culture of emergency preparedness is common. But he said 90 percent of his customers now come from across the United States and range from anyone fearful of natural disasters to more apocalyptic doomsayers to Silicon Valley tech circles.

At the end of January, Conlee started seeing a rise in searches around coronavirus and an uptick in the scale and scope of purchases. Within days, the company’s supply of N95 masks ran out.

Jon Stoke, deputy editor of the Prepared, a website dedicated to the preparedness industry, said he’s also seen a surge in traffic to his site since late January. In early February, he put up a page specifically dedicated to tips for preparing for and surviving an outbreak.

There are only 15 confirmed cases of coronavirus in the United States, and the vast majority of infections remain centered in certain parts of China. The World Health Organization has warned that shortages of protective gear like face masks is due to people stocking up, and has put health-care workers and those at the center of the outbreak at greater risk.

Despite the fact that the outbreak remains many miles and time zones away, Stoke, who lives in Texas, said he didn’t think those stocking up on emergency essentials were driven by panic.