Contagion

The best movie that I saw about a pandemic was the 2011 film Contagion which stars Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow, Kate Winslet, Jude Law, and Laurence Fishburn as Dr. Ellis Cheever. Well, frankly I never really expected to be facing the situation nine years later. 

All the elements were there…Uh, well not everything. Anyways, there's how fast the virus will spread in the community. I think they call it the R-nought - the reproductive rate of the virus. It also tackles the issues on how the virus mutates in time, the process to create the vaccine against the virus, how fast the government (CDC) will act and what measures will it take. 

The movie focuses on a new disease from a virus that came from bats that were transferred to a pig. This fictional virus (called MIV-1) affects the lungs and the brain which causes death to the affected. In the movie, it took only few days for the virus to spread and for casualties to rise. And guess what? The virus came from China. Coincidence right? 

The villain was this Blogger named Alan Krumwiede (Jude Law) who was spreading false news and conspiracy theories about the disease from his blog. He was also spreading false information about the vaccine. Well, that gave bloggers a bad rep. I really like the conversation between Krumwiede and Dr.Ian Sussman (Elliot Gould) when Dr. Sussman told Krumwiede that blogging is not writing. It's graffiti with punctuation. Krumwiede's bad journalism caused panic and death to a lot of misinformed public.

Nine years later, we now face the real thing. Covid-19 also started from bats in China and the virus spread fast all over the world. A lot of people got infected and died. There were panic buying, short supplies of necessary things like face masks, alcohol. The whole world's economy went to a halt. Prices of common commodities sky rocketed. Business closed and a lot of people were out of jobs. But instead of a blogger, misinformation and conspiracy theories about the virus came from posts on social media like Facebook and Twitter. Another thing that the movie didn't tackle was government corruption and how some government officials use the pandemic to keep on stealing money. There is also the slow action of government officials and incompetence. I guess those are reserved for a new movie but at least the movie Contagion is a good example of how the movie imitates real life.