“The just-in-time society based on Amazon is profoundly efficient, but very non-resilient,” says Heywood, who worries what significant disruptions to the supply chain will mean for "a society with only weeks of food on the shelves."

Have money, will prep

Even now, the World Health Organization (WHO) doesn’t want to call the respiratory germ a pandemic, though cases have cropped up in more than 50 countries. About 80% of cases are mild. But the rest are serious. The data so far shows the death rate may be as high as 2%, from lung and organ failure. This virus is no joke.

There isn’t much extra capacity at hospitals either, says Heywood, who served for several years on a biosurveillance committee for the US Centers for Disease Control. In particular, there will be a shortage of respirators, needed to treat the most serious cases of Covid-19, as the lung infection is being called. “They can handle only a little more load before they collapse. I don’t believe that we have a society that can handle a serious increase in load for any serious disease,” he says.

A number of savvy technologists I know have been getting ready for a while. One of them is Robert Nelsen, an investor with Arch Venture Partners. Nelsen was once named biotech’s top venture capitalist and has made a career out of seeing what other people don’t, whether it’s new cancer drugs or CRISPR. So when his Twitter feed took an alarmist turn last month, I noticed. He called the coronavirus a “slow moving train crash at epic scale.”

The Seattle-based investor told me he had been playing Plague Inc., a video game where you try to annihilate humanity with a pandemic virus. “It’s a scary game and it’s not that hard,” says Nelsen, who thinks the coronavirus is “eerily” like it. Back when the WHO was still debating whether the virus was an international emergency, Nelsen was trying to short-sell airline stocks. “I do these things because it’s a way to keep my brain engaged,” he says.

On February 25, Nelsen went public with his preparations when he posted to Twitter a picture of a Costco cart loaded with bottled water, Frosted Flakes, and six supersized bottles of Grey Goose vodka. “Look closely,” he advised his followers. The picture had been taken nearly a month earlier. You want to get your own basement stocked before you raise the alarm.