Science
Gwyneth Paltrow's character is patient zero in the 2011 movie "Contagion."
- A coronavirus outbreak that originated in Wuhan, China, has killed at least 200 people and infected more than 9,700 since December.
- In the weeks since public-health officials reported the first coronavirus case, many people have searched for and watched the 2011 movie "Contagion."
- The film depicts a fictional worldwide pandemic that spreads from animals to people in Hong Kong, then kills tens of millions worldwide.
- Here's how the pandemic from the movie "Contagion" differs from the current Wuhan coronavirus outbreak.
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The 2011 film "Contagion" opens to the sound of a woman coughing. The universal sound of sickness, her cough is heavy and full of mucous. It comes from Beth Emhoff, played by Gwyneth Paltrow, who is patient zero in a pandemic that kills at least 26 million people worldwide in less than a month.
The fictional pandemic in "Contagion," called MEV-1 in the movie, is a hybrid of influenza and the deadly Nipah virus that emerged in Malaysia in the late 1990s.
But because of the real and growing coronavirus outbreak, Google searches for "Contagion" skyrocketed last week. The number of Twitter users mentioning the movie in relation to the current outbreak did as well, and on January 28, "Contagion" was on iTunes' top-10 list of rented movies.
There are many stark differences between the spread of MEV-1 in the movie and the current coronavirus outbreak. Importantly, the coronavirus isn't currently considered a pandemic, though the World Health Organization (WHO) did declare it a global public-health emergency on Thursday.
Since December 31, the coronavirus (whose scientific name is 2019-nCoV) has killed at least 200 people and infected more than 9,000 across 20 countries, including the US.
Health officials have documented person-to-person transmission of the virus in China, Japan, and recently the United States, but the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says "the immediate health risk from 2019-nCoV to the general American public is considered low."
Still, there are a few notable parallels between the scenario in "Contagion" and current events. For one, the movie's MEV-1 virus is a zoonotic disease, meaning it jumped from animals to people. In the film, it spreads from a bat to a pig sold at an outdoor Chinese market, before hopping to Emhoff. According to experts, the novel coronavirus is also zoonotic disease that likely started in bats and infected people via an intermediary animal sold at a wet market in the central Chinese city of Wuhan.
Here are all the ways "Contagion" differs from reality.
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