I Wish “Contagion” Had Come True
It was written as a warning. Now it reads as optimistic.
When Covid-19 hit the U.S. back in March — when offices closed, schools sent kids home, and we sheltered in place — I knew exactly which movie we were living.
Everyone was saying it: “Contagion.”
The 2011 thriller tracks a deadly virus as it takes the world by storm. The eponymous contagion appears when wildlife mingles with livestock. Once it makes the leap into humans, trade and travel carry it around the globe overnight. People cough and collapse, public spaces go quiet, hospitals fill to the point of overflow, and the economy buckles. The similarities to our new reality were uncanny.
Well, “uncanny” implies coincidence. In fact, the screenplay was designed to be as realistic as possible. Its writer, Scott Z. Burns, consulted with epidemiologists before he even started typing. He asked the experts whether a pandemic on the scale he imagined was plausible. Their answer? As Burns told the Washington Post in April, they said “it’s not even a question of if there will be another pandemic; it’s just simply a question of when.”
Burns thus crafted his story around their precise, research-based predictions. The mechanisms by which a virus was likely to arise. The rate and routes through which it…
