Contagion is a movie that follows the first few weeks of a pandemic as it sweeps across the globe, with a large focus in Minnesota, the state I actually live in. There are several big names in this movie: Gwyneth Paltrow, Matt Damon, Laurence Fishburne, Jude law and Kate Winslet, among others.
****Spoiler Alert****
If you haven’t seen the movie, parts of it will be discussed below.
This movie is well researched and is the closest depiction of what I think a pandemic will look like, including the societal impact. It shows the effect at the worldwide level as the WHO (World Health Organization) races to find patient zero, at the national level following the concerns of Homeland Security and at the CDC and the local level following the family of patient zero.
Within hours, the viral perfect storm takes off and the illness quickly begins to spread worldwide. Several health organizations begin to scramble to find a vaccine. They explain that in order to find a vaccine, they have to be able to reproduce it, test it and then obtain approval from the FDA, all of which could take three months or more.
Within two to three weeks the government declares martial law, airports are shut down, and citizens are not allowed to travel from state to state, in an attempt to slow the morbidity rate. These events have several consequences; there is a run on banks, grocery stores are stripped bare, garbage pickup is stopped and the streets are littered with trash bags.
If I remember correctly the morbidity rate was one in twelve, the mortality rate was one in four. They estimated that as many as seventy million would die worldwide and two million five hundred thousand would die in America.
While this movie won’t win any awards for the feel good movie of the year, I do recommend watching it. I watched it as “homework”; I put my family in the situation and looked for where any holes in our preps and plans are.
The acting was good, the musical score was horrible, the story line was believable, and I actually have seen the movie twice so I am going to give it 4 stars.
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