Hacker Cinema
Contagion
2011 · Film · 106 min
Directed by Steven Soderbergh
As an epidemic of a lethal airborne virus - that kills within days - rapidly grows, the worldwide medical community races to find a cure and control the panic that spreads faster than the virus itself.
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74 comments on Hacker News
Wait until you watch the 2011 movie Contagion.
Caturday -> Saturday enjoyed with or similar to a cat
LBA -> probably supposed to be LBAC, Late Bronze Age collapse
Civ -> Civilization, a series of historically inspired strategy games, where you play as the historical leader of a civilization through the ages of human development
Hatshepsut -> an Egyptian Pharaoh who is one of the leaders you can play as in Civ VII
Deity -> the name of the highest difficulty level in Civ VII
Firaxis -> the company that develops the Civilization series
Discord -> a chat app/service often used in gaming communities
ooh la la i call a car hole a garage -> a reference to a joke in The Simpsons, where a character complains someone else thinks they're fancy because they use the word "garage", and when challenged on an alternative, he calls it "car hole"
Old World -> a game similar to the Civilization series
CK III -> Crusader Kings III, another game similar to Civilization
Plague -> probably Plague Inc, a game where you play as a pathogen trying to infect and kill the entirety of humanity
Contagion -> a movie about the start of a pandemic
Rest of the references I can't help with. Also no idea why they would mention the playtest of Civ VII version 1.3.2.
Based on the events in the 2011 film Contagion, I think this is a smart move.
It wasn't entirely prescient...the OG SARS virus in 2002 followed a similar path (with a much more terrifying fatality rate). But that game and the movie Contagion certainly felt a little on the nose once the pandemic hit.
The Book of Eli War of the Worlds 2012 Day of the Triffids (TV series) The Bodysnatchers Waterworld The Postman Contagion
Edit: Movies, unsorted, from the top of my mind:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_of_Control https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Origins https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_East_(2013_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter%27s_Bone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contagion_(2011_film) , seen before Covid, deemed to be realistic, and therefore better than stuff like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Andromeda_Strain with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warning_Sign_(film) somewhere in between. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase_IV_(1974_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wizards_(film) The remakes of the Planet of the Apes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/28_Days_Later , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/28_Weeks_Later a little less so, though it had some great scenes of flying into London City Airport and the modern parts around that. Bladerunner in the original versions, the remake not so much. 2001: A Space Odyssey, the intro and first parts, spaceflight to the moon and such, the rest not. Too boring. I liked the sequel 2010: Odyssey Two better, actually. Avatar. Part one only. All of this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_(franchise) with the exception of the crossover stuff. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elysium_(film) for the almost cyberpunkish fuckedupness of it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dracula_Untold https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beach_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiocracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WALL-E https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Island_(2005_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/THX_1138 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logan%27s_Run_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropia_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rollerball_(1975_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_Dealer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southland_Tales https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/They_Live https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcendence_(2014_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V_for_Vendetta_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Puppet_Masters_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Survivalist_(2015_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernova_(2000_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunshine_(2007_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hidden_(1987_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patient_Zero_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capricorn_One https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangar_18_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_One_(2001_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timecop Ron Silverman Badass! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucy_(2014_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_Blonde https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Are_the_Night_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contact_(1997_American_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Truman_Show https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colombiana https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowing_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dead_Zone_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sphere_(1998_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adjustment_Bureau https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrival_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifeforce_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fourth_Protocol_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_(2013_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_(2009_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Final_Countdown_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paycheck_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cypher_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trigger_Point https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echelon_Conspiracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Anderson_Tapes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Parallax_View https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Seduction
TV-Series: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivors_(1975_TV_series) and the remake linked from there. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Train_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jericho_(2006_TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Strain_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayward_Pines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silo_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colony_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_All_Mankind_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellowstone_(American_TV_series) and its prequel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1883_(TV_series)
WESTWORLD!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_100_(TV_series) Praimfaya! Yeehaa! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterpart_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ark_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altered_Carbon_(TV_series) All of Black Mirror! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_Experiments_Lain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelers_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falling_Skies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devs_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Peripheral_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Expanse_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helix_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incorporated_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raised_by_Wolves_(American_TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/See_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tales_from_the_Loop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutschland_83 and sequels. ÄXZÄLLÄNNT! JAWOLLJA! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humans_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Into_the_Night_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_Worlds_(2019_TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_Nova_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Gods_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozark_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_in_the_High_Castle_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ascension_(miniseries) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Person_of_Interest_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Event https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_One https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolution_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resurrection_(American_TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvation_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Under_the_Dome_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V_(2009_TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caprica
This all began about 2006 with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battlestar_Galactica_(2004_TV_series) after having abstained from possessing a TV, or watching that by other means (with some exceptions for news and documentaries) since 1996, and mostly no cinema either.
That stuff rehooked me in a binge-watching session. Shit happens :-)
Do yoo vanna häff fries wiff thät?
/nerdsnipe off
Contagion also compressed time quite a bit because it’s a movie meant to entertain. It couldn’t show the long months of research, development and testing that actual science requires. Still a great movie.
Contagion got things pretty much spot-on. Conspiracy theorists with fake cures, political officials who fight mitigation measures, contact tracing, panic buying, at-home substitutes for school events, fairly rapid vaccine development and the initial scarcity of it.
The major difference was the mortality rate; the movie's virus killed something like 25%. One of the odd difficulties with COVID is it's deadly enough (especially pre-vaccine) to make a serious pile of excess deaths on a population-level scale, but low enough people can just get used to it.
I wonder if "Contagion" was propaganda. It really made me believe that if a SARS pandemic ever happened, a bunch of incredibly competent scientists and government agents would swoop in and save us all.
The "Olympus Has Fallen" series also made me believe that if a mob ever stepped foot on the White House lawn, a bunch of auto turrets would pop up and gun them all down.
The last few years has shown that the world is run by a bunch of jokers, no different than me. That's comforting in some ways, horrifying in others, and sadly has ruined the illusion of some of my favorite movies.
Just like how the movie Contagion was a prophetic look at the most recent pandemic.
I really wish we could turn back the clocks to a time when crackpot voices were not artificially amplified by social media.
These are all generally highly reviewed can lead to interesting discussions:
Gattaca - interesting take on genetics/DNA discrimination
Europa - hard science fiction, maybe a bit slow for a 12 year old
The Net - older movie but the concept of digital exile resonates today
City of Ember - post apocalyptic civilization that lives deep underground
First Man - dramatization of Neil Armstrong and the first moon landing (not realy "fiction")
Arrival - first contact situation, tastefully done
Contact - another first contact situation that explores how politics, skepticism, and fanaticism react
The Martian - easily as fun as the book
The Prestige - competing magicians in an industrial age setting
The Hunger Games - extreme class divide in a future setting
Jurassic Park - the original not the sequels
Stargate - wormhole travel to another planet (be careful with the TV shows though, SG1 on streaming has full frontal nudity and "not ok" scenes which were obviously not on the broadcast version and a total shock when we watched it as a family)
District 9 - has some graphic gore and language, so it might be 14+, but is an interesting look at aliens as refugees
Contagion - a look at how a pandemic could play out. Premiered before COVID.
The Maze Runner - interesting setting and look at group dynamics
Honey, I Shrunk the Kids - fun setting
The Village - scary movie with a sci fi twist
Galaxy Quest - comedy
Short Circuit - old movie that deals with AI sentience
Innerspace - another old one, but has some fun concepts
What has actually been done to prevent the next outbreak?
I remember there was an acknowledgement that we all knew something like COVID-19 would happen eventually. There was Contagion, a 2011 film about a realistic pandemic, or Bill Gates' TED talk, 'The next outbreak? We're not ready', in 2015. Globally, we weren't prepared for what seemed like an inevitability. Perhaps the 1918 flu pandemic was just outside our familial experience. Just as the memory of The Great War fades, and perhaps the lessons of the Second World War as well, as our parents' parents become memories.
Now, we're more prepared. Although, I suspect stockpiles will fall over the next decade. What are we doing to prevent the next outbreak? We know that research of viruses needs the utmost controls and oversight. They are more deadly than nuclear weapons and we should treat them as such. We know keeping animals in close quarters, mixed species, and in poor conditions is a perfect environment for natural viral evolution. I've seen images of chicken farms in the USA and vertical hog farms in China that give me chills. How can we get a handle on this situation?
I feel like the movie contagion taught us everything we needed to know about pandemics and we just ignored the advice entirely.
Now after utterly dropping the ball on so many fronts when a bad strain of avian flu makes its way into humans we're not going to be able to convince the population to care enough to do the right thing.
There is an bird flu circulating right now jumping around in mammals:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/feb/10/four-dead-seals-test-positive-bird-flu-scotland-aoe
Second this recommendation. I loved Contagion, and watching it during the early days of our own very real recent pandemic put a whole new spin to an already great film.
Yes, but there's literally no way to prove that a random number that you "generated" is actually random. The best idea would be to write people's names on balls, put them in a clear funnel thing, and blow them around or something like that on live TV, but for sortition, I'm not sure how that would scale. In the movie Contagion they did that for each day of the year someone could be born on, and that's how they distributed the vaccines. Not sure how that would scale to millions of balls and how you would audit that each person's name is on one ball and only one ball.
So one key is to not that not thinking the lab leak hypothesis is true =/= thinking it can be dismissed.
Because showing a zoonotic origin of a disease like SARS-CoV-2 is the work of years, if not decades, and with the disruption of the pandemic to research + the political ramifications of that work, it may well already be beyond us.
I think the reason there isn't an enthusiastic readership on the zoonotic side is simply because that's how people are conditioned to think about these diseases. Everything from movies like Outbreak to Contagion, the current fuss about the emu YouTube woman, etc. primes people to think about that. It's hard to foster an enthusiastic readership for what people think they already know.
It's also not particularly...sensational. There's no smoking gun. No shadowy conspiracy. The problems that emerge from zoonoses are hard and dispersed. It makes for very bad SubStack material.
I mean guys, it supposedly started next to a lab that studies the virus and they've yet to find the original bat population spreading it. If I made a Contagion 2 film that asked you to suspend your disbelief wrt. these two facts you wouldn't buy it.
Surely an accident.
The 2011 movie Contagion about human malware originating from China prominently featured Jumbo Floating Restaurant as the ground zero of the Covid-19 spread. Uh I meant MEV-1.
For years every time I saw a forsythia bush flowering in the spring I would think of Jude Law's disaster of a character in Contagion, complete with hearing his lisp in my head.
Then Covid happened, and I discovered that movie was so accurate that I'm not sure I have the stomach to watch it again.
Is there more to your pandemic prediction than 14 months before Corona-19 was declared a pandemic your writing "I have an ominous feeling ... for the last few days I had a sense that a pandemic would come" ?
If not, then that doesn't seem a very striking prediction: public health bodies have been apprehensive for years, maintaining (to varying degrees of effectiveness) pandemic preparations. In the past 20 years there has been SARS (mk 1), MERS, several substantial avian influenza outbreaks, the 2009 swine flu pandemic, and so on. Even a popular movie "Contagion" (2011) about a pandemic from a novel virus of swine + bat origin.
So there has been plenty of awareness of pandemic risks and the foreboding that someday soon the next mass human pandemic would arrive; plenty for your restless subconcious to haunt your sleep with.
It's not just propaganda, it's also the fact that a lot of what is portrayed in films is outside the realm of experience for regular people. People just can't tell what is realistic and what isn't, because many people just don't know.
Battles, gun fights ("it's just a scratch, walk it off"), stabbings, fights and so on.
Then there's topical films like Contagion, and Outbreak.
And then there are disaster films portraying tsunamis nothing like the ones we saw in Japan and Banda Aceh.
We simulate all sorts of plausible scenarios. They're only valuable if the scenarios are realistic enough to be applied to potential real-world stuff.
The risk of a pandemic was clear enough that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contagion_(2011_film) got made about the same time. It ticked pretty much all the boxes - China as origin, people thinking it's a bioweapon, contact tracing, politicians reluctant to take quarantine measures, panic buying, unrest, bat-borne virus, conspiracy theorists and antivaxxers, etc.
It's a hell of a movie to watch in 2021.
Made people believe they were living in the movie "Contagion"
I found Outbreak a pretty poor movie and hard to sit through after watching Contagion first.
Fun movie to watch at the start of the pandemic. "Contagion" is almost crazy prescient too
No to the first one in the same way you wouldn't lump Contagion in with other movies.
The bar is pretty clear: did experts in the field make the story, make the film with an intent of educating, and get the final word in the creative process? If all yes then it isn't to be lumped in with allegories about classism.
Would be nice if we had privacy secure digital passports. Just like the film contagion.
If a private bakery can refuse to bake a cake for a gay marriage than Carnival Cruises or whoever should be able to deny access to those actively endangering the lives of their customers.
Guess what. Predictable, unfortunately.
What strikes me is that life is imitating art to such a high degree of fidelity.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2239913-how-realistic-is-contagion-the-movie-doesnt-skimp-on-science/
What drives these people?
Oh, and this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27852130 got flagged.
HN is now officially part of the anti-vaxx & conspiracy nutcases battleground.
> as is the bizarre insistence on recommending precautions against fomites over aerosols until extremely late
I watched Contagion for the first time last week, and they had the same attitude toward fomites, where it was spread through knobs and cash registers.
I’m convinced that the movie was interpreted as a documentary on what to do rather than science.
Now I question how much hand-washing helps prevent the spread of other respiratory viruses.
Looks like, for flu, in this study, fomites were responsible for 4% of cases:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6121424/
… and
> Mask wearing is much more useful than hand washing for control of influenza A in the tested office setting. Regular cleaning of high-touch surfaces, which can reduce the infection risk by 2.14%, is recommended and is much more efficient than hand-washing.
But I’m just a guy that spent 2 minutes searching studies on Google of respiratory viruses, why make decisions so easily based on that when you can base decisions on a movie on Netflix.
What you misleadingly call an "elaborate story" is exactly the common story of how new disease emerges. It was even in the Sodergbergh movie Contagion from 2011.
While popular films often depict a vaccine that’s effective enough and soon enough to stop an epidemic (Contagion, I Am Legend, World War Z) in real life many epidemics are fought without the help of vaccines (Ebola, HIV, SARS). The combination of speed, effectiveness, and new technology in COVID vaccines is “astonishing” indeed.
Politics seems to be a factor here, but I wonder how much of this has to do with popular culture.
Over the last 20 years we've been bombarded with metric tons of Apocalypse porn, a lot of it focused on killer viruses.
Most of those movies are unrealistic to put it mildly. Zombies. Deserted cities. Rotting corpses on sidewalks. Visible, palpable nauseating death.
This pandemic is nothing like those movies. I know of not a single pop culture depiction that looks anything like what we have now, except maybe the movie Contagion. And that's really a stretch.
So a lot of people have a problem when they see dire predictions and statistics that bear no relationship to what their own five senses are telling them.
There's also the problem of previous pandemics that sounded the alarm, but amounted to little in the US. SARS-CoV-1 and the Swine Flu.
All of this leaves the US with a population primed to expect a very unrealistic kind of pandemic, and already skeptical from previous false alarms. Throw in a president who not only sympathizes with the "hoax" perspective, but actively encourages it, and it should maybe not be surprising that we are where we are.
I wouldn't have thought it, but the world seems to be following the plot of Contagion (2011 film) more and more...
The movie Contagion was surreal for first few months during this pandemic. Whether it is due to survival bias, or any other reasons, the script writer managed to be so accurate.
Hitting several high notes in one stroke is not an easy task. Most of us are lucky if we can even hit even one in real life. Those people in academics are called genius, while in tech world are called 10x programmers.
Thanks for the 'I for one... overlords'. Learn something new today, :-)
On a different but similar note. If the exact movie Contagion, shot for shot, had come out next year everybody would hate it for basically being a slight exaggeration and following the news too closely with barely any originality.
They even made a freaking movie about it (Contagion). So I'd say it was absolutely predictable.
I thought that name was familiar. It’s the miracle drug called “dex” and hyped in the Chris O’Donnell movie, Vertical Limit.
My bet is Vertical Limit is the next movie to trend (after Contagion): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertical_Limit
Commonly, no, but generally we did understand pandemics. Just watch Contagion (2011). If a Hollywood movie would get it that right, then a lot of people had to be pretty sure of the details. It’s no accident that the only changes from reality can be explained by “trying to make a better movie” and “trying to be allowed to air in China”.
Aren't a lot of people profiting off of coronavirus? Zoom, Nintendo, Netflix, etc.? And what about viral apocalypse movies like 'Contagion'?
This stuff helps people cope with stress.
The person you are responding to is suggesting a scenario like the movie 'contagion' where people marked clean are given a wristband or pass of some kind.
In reality testing can be used as an effective tool regardless of whether or not people can be 'certified'
Instead of bird flu being a lucky near-miss wake-up call (it spawned Contagion which laid out the issue in an easy to digest movie format!), it became an excuse to hit the snooze button.
Are you really suggesting there's no criticism of the film on the internet? The film has a 59% on Rotten Tomatoes with plenty of criticism available there.
Personally, I watched it for the first time about a week ago, and was hoping for a movie that was primarily about a virus outbreak. Which it was, for the first hour or so. After that it became a generic (and comically over-dramatic) 90s action movie about the military being bad or something. I wouldn't say it's unwatchable, and it's definitely helped by its all-star cast, but I would agree that if you want to watch a movie about a virus outbreak, you're better off watching Contagion.
Really nice work, I'll share this around.
One minor quibble..."Outbreak" is a terrible movie, bad enough that I'd say don't bother with it. Some good actors, but writing terrible enough that it doesn't help. "Contagion", on the other hand is very well researched, with better acting. It's also interesting how many of the sub-plots and terminology are happening in real life, right now.
It was both malice on the part of Chinese and incompetence of Europeans. But the punchline is the contrast between the hyper-competent, serious image of US healthcare in the movie Contagion and how it turned out in practice.
I always thought the “scan immunity bracelet to go out in public” thing was the craziest and most unrealistic part of the movie Contagion. Shows what I know.
Totally agree, that's said most people cannot get surgical masks anymore, not to mention N95 masks. If we can learn the lesson from outbreak happened before modern tech invented, world would be a better place. We cannot produce or easily buy nanotech material used for N95 masks. However we can use whatever materials avail in our house easily. If need extra protection, add 2 layers of tissue between mask and face. Do not touch mask when you are outside. Stay away at least 2m from any human being. Do not touch anything outside. Immediately take shower and disinfect youself with 80p alcohol at home. :) hopefully most of us will not get infected, I do not want scenario in movie like Contagion or World War Z to happen for human race.
In the movie Contagion (2011) there's an influencer promoting an untested medicine during a global pandemic. It was quite scary and upsetting and all too real.
But now we have the president of the United States recommending you to make your own drug cocktail during a global pandemic. If someone had written that in the script it would've been thrown out as too unreal.
I don't know, but I suspect its popularity of late might have something to do with its use in the 2011 movie Contagion, which has seen much reference in recent days.
Maybe, but with all the people stuck at home, it really should be on everyone's Netflix to-watch list. Fantastic movie.
Some other good picks relevant for these times: The Andromeda Strain (1971) Outbreak (1995) Contagion (2011) Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956 and 1978 versions) 28 Days Later (2002)
There are always vested interests and people with a financial stake, though I was talking about something much lower-level.
A number of zero-medical-experience personalities have become mini-celebrities with their boosting of it. For those who saw the movie "Contagion", their behavior is shockingly similar to the Jude Law character and its boosting of Forsythia. Some of these people are active on HN, and it's amazing how often absolute trash science is heralded like it's some suppressed truth.
A few days back Trump was retweeting one such huckster. A guy who has repeatedly tried to recreate his own Wikipedia page (to be deleted again for non-notability). Who has a pretty standard hustler-and-exploiter bio. Now he's claiming that he's at the forefront of "working with companies" to get this magical treatment to the streets. It is deplorable.
We watched the 2011 movie Contagion directed by Soderbergh, where the next corona virus spread from China at a similar rate to SARS-CoV-2. One of the first things that came up was US officials consulting virus scientists asking "is this a targeted attack"? I recommend the movie. Apparently it was extensively researched, though I'm not saying it's very accurate or totally realistic.
Anyway, what I'm saying is there's something inherent in crises like this that causes us to ask "is someone/something doing this to us". Reminds me of those stories where a plague would be attributed to God's wrath.
I've been great, thanks for asking. It's a good way to spend time with family, clean up the house, learn new home based skills. I think all the zombie/war/survival games and movies have mentally prepared me well for this.
We had a blackout last night, and fish supplier messed up delivery over the weekend because of the broken supply chain. There's been trouble but that's fine. The kids were scared so they found comfort with the grandparents.
It might be a cultural thing though. It seems harder on the West, because we see movies like Contagion suggesting that society would break down and people would trample each other, riot, loot. Maybe the reason toilet paper sold out is because it's a way to cling to society. Anxiety is contagious.
I think there's been a healthy level of fear in Malaysia, with people keeping 1 meter apart in stores, everyone buying bread instead of eating out. It's been easier to shop for groceries and work. There are citizen calls for a full China-style lockdown. Some apartment complexes are doing "concerts", basically group karaoke blaring loud music, led by the person with the biggest speakers. We're experimenting with recipes, ways to replace lattes with instant coffee, and lots of friends I haven't seen for years are playing games online together.
I could get used to this; society feels too crowded and yet fragmented otherwise. But now it feels like we've come together as one big family. A related book is Tribe, by S. Junger, who suggests that people are happiest in difficult times, and all that is gone when society returns to normal.
> Let's tackle recruitment. I've seen trials recruit really fast and that took a month. It's not like someone says "hey I'd like to take part in this trial" and you give them a shot of drug. You need to screen everyone who comes in. Basic labs, then make sure they don't have some other disease that will mess up the results.
You could do that time-consuming screening after they get the trial vaccine, not before. After all, I suspect it is highly unlikely that a virus vaccine would give someone a bacterial disease or a genetic disorder.
Also, before the 6 month trial is up, you're still going to have data trickling in that will give a good indication whether it's working or not.
Source: I saw the movie "Contagion" and learned that a vaccine is considered safe and effective based on one monkey not getting sick. I believe everything celebrities tell me.
Based on my expertise from watching the movie Contagion, one possibility is that a sick bat flew out of the jungle into an open-air pigpen. The bat dropped a food scrap. A pig ate the scrap. A chef later handled the butchered pig. He shook hands with Gwyneth Paltrow during a kitchen tour. She then mingled with many people in the restaurant.
My original mental picture of the Wuhan market was that something weird was happening there, like people swallowing snakes live or doing a ritual with boar tongues. The movie scene demonstrated how a sequence of unremarkable steps could also do it.
When hikers or travelers are beginners, have you seen how much more (or not enough) they pack? With experience or guidance they tend to pack lighter.
In the current case, some are concerned, some are waiting to survive a doomsday, some watched the Contagion movie, some are hoping to make money.
A sane way: For Covid-19, one has to be prepared with basics(food, water, soap, fever-reducing-medicines) for somewhere between 14-27 days of home quarantine (or curfews). And not just assume by default that administration will crumble - they are usually there when you need the basics, except for countries where it has been proven otherwise. Many things that people are stocking up are non-essentials i.e. replaceable with other less comfy methods.
After this is over, the govt. administration can attempt to advertise/educate some preparations for the next unforeseen times. Over a longer period that becomes a cultural habit.
I do not understand why people take unprescribed medicines, especially antivirals as prevention, when that could clearly disturb human microbiome and open up for infections.
Yet the Smurf festival in Lombardy lives on https://twitter.com/chamILYAn/status/1237397658773286913?s=20
As for the movie I think Contagion 2
I find it interesting to compare what's CDC is doing right now ( messed up tests, not enough testing, protecting markets but not people) to what we can see CDC doing in movies like Contagion where they are on top of everything before anyone else even knows that the there is a new virus in the wild.
> things you can binge watch for a month?
this should get you through March :) ...
The Seventh Seal (1957) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0050976/
The Last Man on Earth (1964) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0058700/
The Omega Man (1971) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0067525/
The Andromeda Strain (1971) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0066769/
Dawn of the Dead (1978) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0077402/
Outbreak (1995) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0114069/
12 Monkeys (1995) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0114746/
Cabin Fever (2002) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0303816/
Resident Evil (2002) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120804/
28 Days Later (2003) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0289043/
Children of Men (2006) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0206634/
28 Weeks Later (2007) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0463854/
I Am Legend (2007) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0480249/
Blindness (2008) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0861689/
Carriers (2009) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0806203/
Daybreakers (2009) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0433362/
Black Death (2010) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1181791/
Contagion (2011) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1598778/
Maze Runner: The Death Cure (2011) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4500922/
World War Z (2013) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0816711/
Maggie (2015) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1881002/
Train to Busan (2016) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5700672/
The Girl With All The Gifts (2016) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4547056/
93 Days (2016) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5305246/
Cargo (2017) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3860916/
It Comes At Night (2017) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4695012/
Rabid (2019) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5628902/
The Hot Zone (2019) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4131818/
edit: There is actually a Wikipedia page for the genre (duh!): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Films_about_viral_outbreaks
Just make sure you're all stocked up on Forsythia.
(Oblique reference to the movie Contagion)
Undoubtedly. What is oddly striking is the vast number of similarities between the current viral outbreak and the plot of the movie Contagion ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contagion_(2011_film) )
Outside of the behind the scenes stuff we can't know yet this thing is moving at a remarkably similar arc—save for the severity and fast incubation time of the virus in the film.
They literally have a trial on Forsythia.
If I recall this was the snakeoil peddled as a miracle cure in the plotline to the movie Contagion.
We might take the flu (10,000+ dead so far in the USA this season) and other diseases (measles 140,000 dead world wide) more seriously.
We might actually prepare properly for a Contagion (2011) movie style outbreak.
The scary thing is that humanity is highly susceptible to another plague whether it is STD like AIDS or some other transmission. We live in contact with strangers. Air travel can carry a diseaes around the world in a couple of days. This was depicted in many scifi movies like Contagion.
And gays have not really changed their habits. If you read the profiles on Grindr, the gay hookup app, many people claim to be on the prophalyptic PReP drug regime which allows the more pleasurable and dangerous version of unprotected sex. It wont be HIV but something new.
Humankind has lived with plagues for 10,000 years since agriculture and urbanization has created the population density that allow plagues to flourish. There are plenty of stories where some plague kills off half to 90% of a village goinf all the way back to Classical Greece.
The opening paragraphs of this article really remind me of the film Contagion, which IIRC tried to portray a pandemic hitting the current world as realistically as possible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contagion_(film)
Funny enough, the Contagion movie was funded by Jeffrey Skoll a billionaire philanthropist. The purpose was too educate the public on the reality of a pandemic and importance of health organizations.
There are other movies too, all designed to compel social change.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-giving-pledge-a-new-club-for-billionaires/
It's a very smartly written novel that holds up very well. It's also unusually grim for the era.
Steven Soderbergh's Contagion also comes to mind as an example of a realistic, scientifically accurate depiction of an epidemic.
Michael Crichton's The Andromeda Strain, while not being about zombies, is a very science/fact-based exploration of a hypothetical outbreak. A much less scary scenario, though; the pathogen only affects a single, isolated town which is quickly secured, and all of the action occurs in the experimental underground science lab where they study it. The 1971 film is also fantastic, and holds up really well.
I'm surprised they don't mail the injections out instead of requiring people to assemble (a great place to spread disease).
The movie Contagion was partially set where I live in Minnesota - it contained depictions of people assembling for food, vaccines, treatment, and mass burial. Seeing local landmarks in the movie made it feel very real and made me think more about emergency preparedness.
This is a very important question, which I'll try to answer as clearly as possible.
First, a word of warning: This doesn't look like the appropriate kind of article to be posted on HN. As a doctor, it's hard to understand all that's going on, and even harder to appreciate what the real impact of this research is. Laymen should completely ignore this kind of articles, and read instead clinical trials or meta-analysis that report practical outcomes people are actually interested in, like life expectancy, cure rates, exercise capacity, weight loss, etc. This paper is about some molecular mumbo-jumbo that is not very interesting in itself, unless you're a researcher in the area.
Now, to answer the question. Classically, inflammation was defined by Celsus and Galen as 5 cardinal signs (in latin):
- Tumor (swelling) - Calor (warmth) - Rubor (redness - more noticeable in light skin; don't forget that Celsus and Galen worked primarily with patients from Europe and the Middle East) - Dolor (pain) - Functio laesa (loss of function)
These are clinical signs, that is, something the doctor can observe at the bedside. Think of when you fall and hurt your knee: the area where the impact happens swells. It might become warm to the touch. The skin might become red (different from bleeding). You'll feel pain, and for a while, your knee won't work very well because it hurts (loss of function). You don't need any fancy equipment to analyse these signs.
Now, these are adaptations of the body to injury: redness and warmth appear because the blood vessels in the skin dilate in response to injury. Blood brings red blood cells, which caus redness, and heat from the inside of the body, which causes the skin to be warm to the touch. The blood vessels also "open holes", which causes the liquid part of the blood to escape the bloo vessels and get between the cells, thus causing swelling. The injured cells release signalling substances, which are detected by neurons in the skin, thus causing the individual to feel pain. Finally, some or all of these changes, might cause the limb to lose it's usefullness (because it hurts and it's swollen). The goal of inflammation is to bring white blood cells to the place of the injury in order to fight a possible infection and assist in the repair of the injured tissue. Pain doesn't help protect or repair the tissue directly, but it notifies the organism to the fact that something wrong is happening, which causes the brain to act appropriately: remove the limb from a hot surface in the case of a burn, protect a wound, etc. People that are not sensitive to pain have serious problems from childhood because they lack these indirect protective responses (they won't remove their hand from burning coals, even as they smell their flesh burning, for example)
This is the classical picture of inflammation, caused by a wound or trauma to the body. It's simple, and it's functions are (nowadays) obvious.
But we can go deeper... Let's talk about pneumonia. Pneumonia happens when a bacteria or virus overwhelms the defenses of the lungs, and starts reproducing in the normally microorganism-free lung. This causes blood vessesls to upen up (thus causing swelling), to dilate (thus causing redness), but the lung probably doesn't get any warmer - it's already pretty warm. The patient will not feel pain. After all, the inside of the lung doesn't have nerves capable of feeling pain! (the outside does, and if the inflammation gets near the peripheral part of the lung, it might be VERY painful). Maybe the lung won't get any warmer (it's already pretty warm already). You will run a fever, but that's not the same kind of warmth we've discussed. You will feel breathlessnes, that is, loss of function of the lung. So, while some things are common the picture gets murky. Also, the body is working very hard to defend itself, and is now producing lots of molecules that circulate in the blood and which we associate with "inflammation". We now need some fancy equipement to detect these molecules: our 5 senses are not good enough. Even though the swelling if the lungs can be detected by auscultation (with a stethoscope), the doctor probably use somethin like an X-Ray machine to visualize the swelling.
Let's go deeper. Some bacteria enter the bloodstreem and latch to a valve of the heart. This kind of infection is called an endocarditis. The valve has no blood vessels, so you won't get swelling. You won't get redness or warmth either (again, you ill run a fever, but that's different). The valve also has no nerve endings, so you will feel no pain! The bacteria will happily eat your valve away (and when it's eaten away you'll die), but it may take time, and meanwhile, the valve can work relatively well. So, no loss of function. Yet, your body is fighting in overdrive to clear the infection and kill the bacteria. In fact, lots of mollecules associated with inflammation are running wild all through the body, sometimes causing as much damage as the infection itself! These are the same mollecules your body produces in pneumonia, and also in other kinds of "deep" infections. So, in a sense, even though we have amost none of the 5 classical signs of inflammation, we have a response of the body that aims to defend it against infection. So we might decide to call it inflammation. Again, we can't see the inflammation here. We need some fancy machines to see the damaged valve (even though we can listen to the valve failing with a stethoscope), and fancy lab equipment to detect these molecules, as well as the consequences of the inflammation inside the body.
If we go even deeper, we'll "discover" that heart attacks (technically "myocardial infarctions") are the result of inflammation too. Even though what the patient feels is just pain, possibly followed by loss of function: breathlessness and death.
So, at each step, we get further removed from the intuitive description of inflammation, which you can feel with your hands and see with your eyes, into a scary realm only accessible with the help of lab equipement and thick books. At this point, inflammation is actually a buzzword that means little...
This paper's conclusion doesn't mean that the hypothalamus (a part of the brain) is red, swollen, warm, painful or has stopped functioning. That would be an encephalitis, an extremely serious disease that will land you in a hospital or a coffin (see the movie "Contagion" for some realistic depictions of encephalitis). It means that some cells, vaguely associated with inflammation, are producing some mollecules which in most parts of the body are associated with inflammation.
In most situations, inflammation is either bad or signals something bad. In this situation it certainly seems bad: the concrete changes that inflammation brings to the brain seems to be similar to the ones caused by diabetes (according to my cursory reading of the article). But I agree that the word has been used for so many things, that you can't actually tell whether inflammation is good or bad.
On the other hand, inflammation is a defense mechanism of the body. So what is a person with no inflammation at all? It's a person really close to death, because Nature is scary and full of bugs, and someone incapable to mount an inflammatory response is what bacteria, viruses and fungi call dinner. People like these exist (either from birth or due to unfortunate circumstances), and we can only keep them alive by keeping them in very clean rooms and pumping them full of antibiotics until their immune system (and the capability to mount an inflammtory response) recovers.
Using the same word for what protects us from infection and for what turns our brains into something similar to the brains of a person with untreated diabetes is confusing. We're at a point where when a doctor talks about inflammation, it has a dompletely different thing in mind from laymen. A doctor might even have something completely ifferent in mind from another doctor or from a researcher (which is more serious).
In the end, I have nothing to tell you except that you're right to be confused, and if it serves as a consolation, I'm often similarly confused when I read the titles of these papers (and sometimes the abstracts), even though I've been studying these things for years.
"The new virus — eventually called Nipah — is on the World Health Organization's list of viruses most likely to cause a global pandemic. It's the virus that inspired the 2011 movie Contagion. And just this past January, governments and philanthropists pledged hundreds of millions of dollars to develop a Nipah vaccine because it poses such a big threat."
Am I the only one concerned that this doctor, regardless of his sincerity, just packed these in his carry-on and took them on an international flight without using standard biohazard protocols?
There was also a BBC documentary called "Pandemic" which was pretty good, with more relatable characters than Contagion had in my opinion.
For an chillingly realistic depiction of how a worldwide pandemic could unfold, I'd highly recommend watching the film Contagion (2011)[1]. For all those who complain governments and scientists overreacting to new flu strains, I would prefer that than the alternative - doing too little and being swamped by an uncontrollable virus.
[1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1598778/
It's not said often enough, but Contagion is probably the best and most realistic movie to deal with the likely scenario of a deadly pandemic. Everything from the political and economic impact along with the roles of the scientists and field personnel were spot on.
I found it to be a riveting story.
Tangentially related, but reading this was very reminiscent of the movie Contagion: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1598778/.
> I love clever touches like this in TV and films.
Me too, "Contagion" movie hired Dr. W. Ian Lipkin who is a specialist in molecular methods for pathogen discovery: http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/culturelab/2011/09/contagion-doesnt-skimp-on-science.html