VAN NUYS, Calif. – Worried over the possibility of a Coronavirus quarantine that could bring businesses to a halt, Sonia Roman of Granada Hills and her husband are stocking up on supplies just in case.

“We bought about $1,000-worth of food the last week, going to buy 50 pound bags of rice and 25 pound bags of beans,” Roman said.

Their local big box stores, like Costco, are already out of some critical emergency products like water and hand sanitizer, according to Roman. So they paid a visit to S.O.S Survival Products, a disaster preparedness store in Van Nuys, to round out their preparedness plan.

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“We just came here to get more odds and ends, obviously there’s no masks left,” Roman said looking at empty shelves where masks used to be displayed.

The store has also run out of most of its emergency food supplies including MREs, or meals-ready-to-eat, kits.

Roman and her husband say they’re not panicked, but want to take extra precautions because back in January they traveled to Latin America and both got sick with respiratory illnesses when they came home.

“We went in to the local ER and they were impacted with cases from the flu. So we left, and he left with a temperature of 103 degrees,” Roman said. “And we thought, this is just a few of us trying to get in. What’s going to happen when there’s a run on the hospital?”

L.A. County Public Health Department officials say being prepared for any type of emergency situation or disaster is always a positive, but they want to temper the worries with this message about COVID-19:

“At this point in L.A. County we only have had our one case. There’s a public health department that has a good response to identifying cases and close contacts. And while we want people to get prepared for there to be more cases, I’m not sure you need to rush out and stock up on everything,” said Dr. Barbara Ferrer, director of the LA County Department of Public Health.

Ferrer added that despite concerns, the county has enough testing kits.

Roman admits she and her husband have never taken steps to be quite as prepared for an emergency, as they are for a possible COVID-19 pandemic.

But she feels it will pay to have some sense of security in case the outbreak gets worse and ends up affecting her community.