It seems like movies have inspired words in this blog lately. The movie Contagion was destined to cause a reaction from the first time that I saw the trailer. This movie hits a little close to home in that it involves a killer virus and a bunch of epidemiologists. Being an epidemiologist and knowing a bunch of CDC EIS officers, I must be a little nit-picky about this movie. Otherwise, the producers did get a lot of things right.
From the trailer, you get the impression that there is some kind of sub-plot involving an intentional release of a nasty virus that causes devastation throughout the world, but that is not the case. Actually, that would have made the movie a little more believable. As it stands, the virus is supposedly an extra virulent strain of Nipah that originated in a bat and somehow infected a single pig, where the virus failed to infect other pigs, and went straight to Gwyneth Paltrow. Yes, this is a thinly veiled attempt to talk about Influenza virus without implicating Influenza. The origin, or ‘day 1’ scenario that this movie paints is not really believable. If such a virus existed, then pig farmers, abattoir workers and the chef handling the pig would all have contracted the virus long before the unsuspecting tourist.
Okay, so let’s forget about the whole origin of the virus and assume that it exists and causes badness on a scale depicted by this movie. If the supposed patient 0 was spreading virus at a Hong Kong casino then there were at least two plane loads of exposure that wasn’t accounted for at the start. In other words, there would have been many more cases by the time that Gwyneth Paltrow’s character dies.
The other thing that bothers me is that the State Department of Public Health (in this case Minnesota) was treated as a bunch of moronic bureaucrats, when in fact; they are educated epidemiologists and not in need of pages of exposition by the main characters. The whole government response to this outbreak seems uncoordinated. In most cases, I believe that there would have been more done to get in front of things.
If the virus burns through the population as fast as all that, then why are public services not totally disrupted? Apparently in the world the movie paints, you have looting at grocery stores, no trash pickup, but you still have electricity, cable, internet, and cell phone service. Additionally, once the virus burns through an area, those left behind should be assumed to have some degree of immunity, so the whole sub plot with the WHO worker who was kidnapped in order to secure vaccine for a village in the epicenter of the outbreak makes little sense.
What does make sense from this movie? It does show how quickly we can get behind an outbreak and does give a worst case scenario to a government response. The movie touches on some issues such as the speed at which we can respond to a novel virus and the misinformation and potential profiteering that could accompany such an outbreak.
For me, the devil is in the details, and it’s much easier for me to dismiss something where a few nit-picky facts are wrong than a total suspension of belief (i.e., a virus from outer space, a la Andromeda Strain). Are we prone to such a disease outbreak? Sure, but there will be signs and mini-outbreaks before it explodes as a pandemic. The more terrifying plot that isn’t explored by this movie is that we are more likely to ignore the threat of a newly emerging virus than to totally be blindsided by a virus that latches on to one international traveler.
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