It’s an old fashioned idea — planning for the worst and hoping for the best. When a Covid-19 case appeared in Hawaii a couple of weeks ago, I created a shared online document for my family: “prepper list.” We added everything we thought we’d need if the virus hit California: medicines, canned vegetables, rice. But we kept realizing there were random things we hadn’t thought about: cat food, toilet paper, coffee. The prepper list started as a whimsical thought experiment, but today I checked off the final items. Then I started texting my neighbors and friends about pooling our resources. When I showed a friend my cabinets full of prepper supplies, she looked at me quizzically and asked, “So … you went to Trader Joe’s?”

Yes, it may look like a little cozy shopping, but the raw psychological reality is that everyone I know is vacillating between freak-out and denial. One night, my friends and I talked about “plague news” in such grisly detail that one of us had to declare a moratorium because he was getting too upset. So we watched three episodes of “Brooklyn 99” instead of figuring out whether we had enough medical supplies to survive two weeks of mandatory lockdown.

This isn’t some meme-corroded, cynical response. We’re coping the same way people did in previous plaguey times. News blackouts during the 1918 Spanish flu prevented people from understanding how deadly it was. And even afterward, when it was known that it had claimed 50 million to 100 million lives, only a few people wrote documentary accounts of the pandemic — Katherine Anne Porter explored it in fiction with her novel “Pale Horse, Pale Rider.” It was as if an entire generation just wanted to forget. Only in the 1970s did Alfred Crosby write a history of the devastating disease in a book called, tellingly, “America’s Forgotten Pandemic.”

Back in the late 1340s, the English poet and essayist Geoffrey Chaucer survived the first wave of the Black Death that killed off 50 percent of London’s population. He grew up in a world forever changed by a pandemic, and yet he mentions the plague only once in his enormous body of work. My point is that people have been trying to forget about pandemics for almost a millennium — the urge to hide from the truth and binge watch comedy (or write “The Canterbury Tales”) is strong.

As a science journalist, I’ve been following news of this outbreak carefully and warning my friends of its coming. I thought I was ready. After all, my family still has boxes of N95 masks left over from two years ago, when San Franciscans dealt with heavy smoke from the California wildfires. But what I’ve realized over the past few days is that I’m ready for a world-ending disaster — and that’s very different from being ready to survive in a world that’s damaged but still going.