Nothing spreads like fear.
That was the tagline of “Contagion,” a 2011 movie in which the likes of Gwyneth Paltrow, Laurence Fishburne, Matt Damon and Kate Winslet contend with a mysterious virus that soon decimates the globe. It earned good reviews, high marks for accuracy and $136 million in worldwide box office. Then it was more or less forgotten.
Until now. Suddenly, “Contagion” is back. As reported by NPR, it briefly pierced the Top 10 list of iTunes downloads earlier this month and the number of Google searches for the film recently spiked. The painfully obvious reason: COVID-19, a coronavirus disease that has spread from China to much of the rest of the world, including Egypt, Japan, Italy, Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States.
Thankfully, the movie’s grim tagline has not come true – no panic in the streets, no calling out the National Guard, no isolating government officials. That’s surely because the lethality rate of the real disease is so much less than that of the fictional one, which killed roughly one out of every five people who got it.
Still, there is a queasy, palpable unease in watching this thing spread, as cruise ships are quarantined, Americans are airlifted and Apple takes a hit to its bottom line. One can’t help but imagine how, if the lethality rate ticked up or the impact on the global economy became more pronounced, the misinformation machine that is the right-wing media complex would vomit up some nutty conspiracy theory and we’d have panicky people at one another’s throats.