Contagion and the Coronavirus – Parallels and Differences

Published by PolisPandit on March 16, 2020March 16, 2020

No surprise, Contagion is suddenly a top movie on nearly every streaming service.  In late 2019, it ranked 270th in views in the Warner Bros. catalog prior to Coronavirus spreading around the world.  As of this writing, the Steven Soderbergh film ranks second, only trailing the Harry Potter series for the poll position.  Contagion resonates during this current period of pandemic-fueled hysteria because its parallels are striking: bats, mass quarantines, global impact, etc.  More importantly, the film helps people cope with the unknown, providing security in the same way as toilet paper hoarding (which is ridiculous, by the way).  It illustrates how national (Center for Disease Control) and global (World Health Organization) organizations play their respective roles amidst a pandemic. 

Yet it also celebrates competent federal government bureaucrats.  In fighting the Coronavirus today, the main difference is that governments have largely been slow to react, or like the Trump administration, have only created more chaos.  This has only stowed confusion during times when people need comfort and answers.  Billionaires have acted with more certainty and heroism than the people charged with leading western civilizations, like Donald Trump.  By contrast, in Contagion, the government workers are the heroes. 

This article contains spoilers, so watch the movie before reading further if that matters to you.  These are extraordinary times.  Make sure to follow this CDC guidance if you are sick or suspect you are infected.  If there is anything a movie like Contagion teaches us, it’s that we must take a pandemic like Coronavirus seriously and exercise the necessary precautions to mitigate its spread.  We may not have the ability to stop it, but we can help to protect the more vulnerable among us by reducing density and taking a few simple steps.  Whether it’s social distancing or  washing hands for at least 20 seconds, there are certain measures that can go a long way toward mitigating this virus’s spread.                     

We Touch Everything

The beginning scenes of Contagion are riveting. Coughing. People touching everything, from subway poles to faces. Germaphobes may get a bad rap, but during a pandemic there is nobody better to be around. It is not until the end of the movie that we learn the virus was transmitted to Gwyneth Paltrow’s character (patient zero) from a chef shaking her hand in Hong Kong. The chef had just handled pigs that had come into contact with bats. All it took was a simple touching of his hands with hers.

Kate Winslet’s character (Dr. Erin Mears) had one of the more disturbing lines about touching.

“The average person touches their face two or three thousand times a day. Three to five times every waking minute. In between, we’re touching doorknobs, water fountains, elevator buttons . . . and each other.”

In the aftermath of Coronavirus, will we still shake hands as custom? Will we still touch people or objects as frequently as we do? When will we finally move past paper money and physical credit cards? Will people start washing their hands regularly for at least 20 seconds? Having been in a few public restrooms, I have almost never witnessed this phenomenon pre-Coronavirus.

A Movie Before Its Time

When Contagion first came out in 2011, I remember thinking, “Wow, that would suck.” Then I forgot about it. I think most of us did. Despite the all-star cast – Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow, Kate Winslet, Laurence Fishburne, Jude Law – the movie won no major awards and left the public consciousness almost immediately after entering it. John Hawkes was only in a couple scenes as a janitor for God’s sake!

Watching the movie almost 9 years later with Coronavirus spreading globally, it is clear now how prescient Contagion was for its time. In 2011, the most recent major outbreak was SARS, which ravaged Southeast Asia in 2003. The Spanish Flu of 1918 was horrific (killed over 50 million people), but is difficult to apply to modern times in a globalized economy (although WWI did exacerbate its global spread).

Soderbergh’s ability to forecast and predict how a pandemic would impact the contemporary interconnected world is impressive. Coronavirus has followed his script from the purported source to the mass hysteria (runs on grocery stores included). A couple of particularly prescient aspects of the film include:

• The virus source and the “Day 2” start. By starting on “Day 2” of the outbreak, the audience wonders – much as we do today – how did the pandemic start? We try to piece together the plot as the characters do all the way to the end. Most experts suspect that the source of the Coronavirus was a “wet market” in Wuhan, China that sells both live and dead animals. And while the animal source has not been confirmed, some scientists think it emanated from bats. Bats were not sold in Wuhan markets, but as shown in Contagion, they often come into close contact with animals (such as pigs and chickens) that are sold in those markets. We see at the end of Contagion how a bat drops something into a pig pen, which gets consumed by the pigs, setting off the deadly chain reaction.
• Jude Law is Alex Jones. Soderbergh predicted that misinformation and price gouging would abound in a pandemic. Jude Law’s character plays a modern day Alex Jones, the right-wing conspiracy theorist most infamous for peddling lies about the Sandy Hook shooting. The $100,000 fine he paid for those lies, however, did not deter him from selling fake “Coronavirus cures” on his website, InfoWars. Jude Law’s character does literally the same thing – hustling bogus virus cures. Although I take issue with the broader critique lobbed at him that “Blogging is is not writing. It’s just graffiti with punctuation.” At least he did not amass a stockpile of almost 18,000 bottles of hand sanitizer like this guy.

The point is: there is a lot of misleading and outright false information about the Coronavirus, including fake testing kits (what’s wrong with people?). Follow guidance from legitimate sources like CDC and the WHO and ignore the social media noise.

The Government Bureaucrats Are Too Heroic

For all of Contagion’s spot-on prognostications, the notion of competent bureaucrats from federal and global institutions cooperating to efficiently eradicate a virus seems far-fetched in today’s political climate. The Republican Party of Trump is more likely to agree with a conspiracy theorist like Alex Jones than marshal a plan that effectively coordinates government resources.

In Contagion, one of the more senior government officials we meet is Laurence Fishburne’s character at the CDC. The movie presents bureaucrats like him as generally measured and respectable, although not without fault. Fishburne’s character succumbs to temptation when he notifies his fiancee about an upcoming quarantine before the CDC publicizes it. With that said, the movie does not showcase a CDC woefully ill-equipped to manage the virus response, even when it comes to basic things like testing.

In contrast to the feel good government response in Contagion, the Trump administration has displayed chaotic management. Current numbers of those infected seriously underrepresent the actual number of cases. There are not enough tests and testing was not expanded beyond CDC labs until the virus was allowed to spread steadily across the country. Even Anthony Fauci, the respected director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, admitted that the US is failing on testing.

And the worst part? The Trump administration dismantled the National Security Council’s global health office shortly into its term. The primary function of that office was to address global pandemics. Apart from defunding this office, Trump himself has displayed his typical behavior of misinformation and impulsive, erratic actions. He even resisted letting people disembark a cruise ship for fear it would increase Coronavirus numbers.

Had Soderbergh added a President to his 2011 movie, it is hard to imagine him modeling this character after Trump. The government officials in Contagion may have acted out of self-interest at times, but they also showed benevolence. For example, Fishburne’s CDC character brought a vaccine intended for himself to John Hawkes’s (the janitor’s) son. The movie paints too rosy a picture of bureaucrats and government institutions, particularly in the age of Trump.

A Cautionary Tale

Contagion served as a warning 9 years ago. Yet as human society continued to progress and bull markets soared, pandemic preparedness was not prioritized. In fact, governments defunded it. In Contagion, the government bureaucrats were the heroes who swooped in to save the day. The movie blamed the private sector for the virus. The final scene shows a corporation’s bulldozer destroying trees in China, prompting a bat to fly toward a pig farm.

That is a far cry from today’s situation. Western civilizations have had turned to billionaires, not governments, to provide aid and assistance. With many saying that Coronavirus will impact us until the fall or even 2021, we are likely only getting started. Hopefully this will be a lesson to governments the world over that pandemic preparedness must be taken seriously. We are fortunate that Coronavirus has not been more deadly. If only this pandemic could conclude in the orderly manner that the virus did in Contagion. That is one parallel between the movie and now that we desperately need.