Pandemic Survival Math Quiz
# 182
Question #1
You have 100 N95 masks, which may only be worn for up to 2 hours before disposal. Your daughter wakes up Monday morning, January 1st with avian flu symptoms, and requires round-the-clock care by you and your spouse for 3 weeks. On what day of the month will you run out of masks?
Question #2
You’ve successfully stockpiled 500lbs of rice and beans, which provides 1000 man/day meals of basic nutrition for your family of 4. If the pandemic begins on January 1st 2007, what day of the year will you run out of food?
Question #3
On January 7th, your no-good brother-in-law Earl, his wife Thelma, and their 3 rug rats show up at your door. Reluctantly you agree to take them in. On what day now will your supply of Rice and Beans run out?
Question #4
You are preparing packets of ORS powder for your family of 5. Assuming the average person would need 1 gallon of ORS fluids per day, for an average of 10 days, how many 1-quart packages should you prepare in advance?
Question #5
You have 60 Tamiflu capsules and 60 500mg tablets of probenecid in your medicine cabinet. Probenecid doubles the half-life of your tamilfu when taken every 12 hours. If the effective daily dose of Tamiflu is 300mg (4 capsules) without Probenecid, how many 10 day courses of the Tamiflu/Probenecid combo do you have on hand?
Question #6
You have 5 family members, 2 male, and 3 female. Males use 1/2 roll of toilet paper a week, while females use 1 roll. When buying for a pandemic, how many 4-roll packs of toilet paper will you need to last 2 years?
Question #7
You’ve bought a generator that burns .6 gals of fuel an hour. You have 2 6-gal jerry cans of gas, plus two cars, one with 12 gals of fuel in the tank, and 1 with 16 gallons of fuel. Assume you can only siphon 80% of the fuel from the cars. If you run your generator 4 hours per day, how many days can you run your generator?
Question #8
You have a glock 17 as your personal sidearm with a 17 round clip and a spare magazine in your back pocket. You are cornered by a pack of 15 hungry dogs. Assuming it takes 3 shots to take down each dog, how many dogs will you feed?
Question #9
HHS has stockpiled 21.4 million 10-pill courses of Tamiflu. New guidelines suggest an effective dose is 4 x’s higher. Assuming 300 million people in this country, what percentage of the population could receive the new dose?
REMEMBER TO SHOW YOUR WORK
Answers:
1. Requires 12 masks/day, so 100 masks would last 8.333 days. You would run out of masks mid day on the 9th.
2. 1000 man/day meals divided by 4 gives 250 days. Supply will last till September 7th, 2007.
3. 1000 man/day meals would run out for your group on April 15th.
4. 5 family members x’s 4 packets/day x’s 10 days. You’d need 200 packets of ORS, or enough for 50 gallons of ORS solution.
5. A 10-day course of Tamiflu with Probenecid would be 20 pills. You’d have 3 10-day courses.
6. Family usage would be 4 rolls/week, or 416 rolls in 2 years. You’d need 104 4-packs of toilet paper.
7. Running 4 hrs a day, and burning .6 gals/hr, you’d consume 2.4 gals of fuel a day. Gas tank storage of 28 gals x’s 80% = 22.4 gals. Add 12 gals in jerry cans = 34.4 gals. At a rate of 2.4 gals a day, your fuel will last 14.333 days.
EXTRA CREDIT : If you thought to punch a hole in the lowest point of gas tank to retrieve additional 5.6 gals of fuel, you get 16.666 days of generator power and a gold star.
8. With only 34 rounds of ammo, and the expenditure of 3 rounds for each dog killed, you would still have 4 dogs left in the pack when you ran out of bullets. Sorry.
9. The 21.4 million doses of tamiflu would equate to only 5.35 million effective courses. Enough for 1.78% of the population of the United States.
BTW, the point of this little exercise isn't to show the futility of prepping, but rather to show the importance of doing the math when you do prep. What looks like a lot stuffed into your garage, or hall closet, may not be as much as you think.
The assumptions in the above math problems are for demonstration purposes only. If you can take out 15 dogs with 15 shots, or if your generator only burns .4 gals/hr, congratulations. Adjust your calculations accordingly.
