The film "Contagion" and the book "World War Z" are fictional accounts of global pandemics, but can they teach us something about the real coronavirus pandemic that we are currently facing?
The answer is yes if you ask Joel Wertheim, a UC San Diego assistant professor, Division of Infectious Diseases and Global Public Health in the Department of Medicine. He uses the 2011 Steven Soderbergh film "Contagion" to teach a class every fall in epidemiology.
I excerpted a part of my interview with Wertheim for Midday Edition on Monday, but here is my full interview where we talk in-depth about what we can learn from a film like "Contagion" and why fictional works warning about global pandemics didn't help us prepare better for our real, current one.
To start my discussion, I asked Wertheim to explain what exactly we are fighting when we face a virus.
"Viruses are just tiny packages of genetic material and maybe a little bit of protein that can get into your body, take over its machinery and replicate themselves so they can take over more cells and just keep replicating. And as they do this, that can cause harm to their hosts. They don't have plans. They don't have intentions. They just replicate because replicating helps them infect more people," Wertheim said.
That description made me think of John Carpenter's "The Thing." A virus, like the thing in Carpenter's film, is not anything you can reason with, it’s just looking for a host. It’s a parasite that needs a living host but unlike other parasites that have the ability to grow and live on their own, a virus can only survive by getting into a host cell. That’s horror.
"The Thing" is a work of science fiction, but "Contagion" plays out like a blueprint for what we are dealing with today with the coronavirus.
Here is the trailer for "Contagion." It is currently streaming on multiple services including Amazon Prime Video, YouTube, and iTunes.
