Prior to 2020, I’d often get asked about the movie Contagion. For example, which character does a job similar to yours? (A: Kate Winslet). And how accurate is it? (A: More accurate than any other pandemic film you’re likely to see.)
Two years into the COVID pandemic, I was asked the question again for a podcast. As well as seeing many pandemic features play out much as expected prior to COVID, the movie also hit on some details that I wouldn’t necessarily have anticipated. This is the power of creative writing, helping us to imagine possibilities beyond the obvious and familiar. So here’s an overview of some of ways Contagion the movie would later mirror COVID the reality.
Christmas evolution
In a remarkable coincidence, the virus in Contagion mutates to become more transmissible just before Christmas. Which is exactly what happened with the Alpha COVID variant in the UK; it was declared a variant of concern on 18th December 2020.
Contagion was prescient in other ways too when it came to evolution. When the movie came out, real-life researchers criticised a scene where scientists point to an evolutionary tree and conclude the virus is more transmissible. At the time, there simply wouldn’t have been enough in a handful of sequences to know with confidence that the virus spreads more easily (as I explain in this post, predicting epidemiological characteristics from sequence data is extremely difficult.) But during COVID, there were more than a handful of sequences being collected (the UK alone sequenced over a million SARS-CoV-2 viruses in the first 18 months of the pandemic). This meant evolutionary trees did turn out to be useful in identifying which variants lineages were spreading more successfully.
Dodgy cures
When Contagion came out, it was hard to imagine anyone thinking ‘you know what, when a real pandemic comes along, I’d really like to be Jude Law’s character’. But unfortunately that’s what we saw, with fictional claims about forsythia replaced with real claims about hydroxychloroquine (a malaria drug that was ineffective against COVID) and the ivermectin (a deworming drug that was also ineffective against COVID).
Birthday allocation of vaccines
In Contagion, the limited supply of initial vaccines are roll-out based on a random birthday-based ballot. During COVID, birthdays also featured in many countries’ vaccine programmes. With risk heavily skewed with age, it was year of birth – rather than day of the year – that dictated when people got their vaccine in countries like the UK.
A key plot line involved someone having an affair
You all know the real-life story, so I won’t dwell on it. Although it was prescient that the film also had a Matt (Damon) involved.
The wait for patient zero
In the early stages of an outbreak, people are understandably interested in where the pathogen came from. COVID was no different, with intense speculation that continues to this day. But Contagion got it right in only showing the origins of the pandemic at the end of the film; its rare we learn the answer during the crisis, if ever.
And, in any case, in early 2020, the origins of COVID were not the most pressing question that the world had to deal with. Nowadays, the media often lament why people weren’t taking COVID more seriously in February 2020. Part of the answer, I think, is that rather asking questions like ‘there’s a very nasty virus heading our way and what do we want to do about it?’, several newspapers were instead filling their front pages with talk of ‘snake flu’.
Not even Contagion saw that one coming.
When I used to teach a short course on risk we examined estimation techniques and outcomes. I demonstrated how difficult in was to predict events especially as so many factors were in operation.
I ended with a story about the terrible twin tower event and how politicians asked experts for advise. One replied "Go watch the worst disaster movie ever made. That's what can happen!" How true that was I don't know. For some reason this sticks in my mind while I've lost memory of the risk assessment techniques.