A virus originates in China. Though that detail doesn't really matter. It is quick and easily contagious and breaks free of any possibility of containment. No treatment is available initially. Mortality is similar to the Spanish Flu pandemic of 90 some years ago, or worse. Millions and millions die.
People then act like, you know, people at all levels. Civil order almost completely breaks down. Some act nobly and heroically. Many act like scared violent animals. Some lie on the internet and get millions extra killed. Some do their best and try to keep their head down and just get through this, hoping things will get back to normal in a year or so. When gummint folks make an error they are probably not motivate by evil, and probably not greed either. Chance are they are merely incompetent or make a mistake. People do that.
The movie made me want to buy more MREs and such.
It was ok as a piece of entertainment. Nothing to write home about performance-wise. Better as a lesson of possibility.
Dont's:
- Don't arm yourself with you first gun after the rioters and looters have slaughtered your neighbor, necessitating YOU to search the homes of other empty homes for that left behind side by side.
- When you go shopping for groceries and the looting has been going on for at least an hour, don't press on hoping that maybe YOUR grocery store is fine and working as normal.
- Don't fail to have a years worth of food on hand.
- Don't trust your hot blonde wife named Gwyneth Paltrow NOT to sleep around on you. She does it in a plurality of her movies. THINK, man.
- Stop touching your face. That's how you get germs.
5 comments:
I have a cold right now, too. If it was a deadly virus I wouldn't have to worry about the MREs at this point.
I always forget to wash my hands frequently when I'm out and about. Which is probably why I've caught every major bug going around this year. I'd be in deep kim-chi in a real pandemic (not made up ones like SARS and H1N1).
I don't know if those are fake diseases as much as overblown. But yes, pushing the panic button unnecessaily in the past was mentioned in Contagion as a problem that hurt their response to this new deadly bug.
Movies like this and 12 Monkeys shows how easy it is to spread a pandemic before we are aware it's happening.
I JUST finished reading "The American Plague" by Molly Caldwell Crosby. Ebola, SARS, H1N1, Avian flu or Swine flu are slackers compared to Yellow Fever. Ms Crosby starts with a description of the symptoms of Yellow Fever and its effects on Memphis in 1878, when a Yellow Fever epidemic devastated the Mississippi Valley. In Memphis alone, the mortality rate was 70% among whites but only 8% for blacks many of whom grew up in the south and thus had some immunity; of 6,000 whites with the fever, 4,000 died. Of 14,000 blacks with the fever, 946 died. Like in Contagion, people did rob and ransack the homes of dying people.
While Yellow Fever was knocked down by sanitation and elimination of breeding places after discovery of the mosquito vector by Walter Reed and others in 1900 (yes, that Walter Reed), it wasn't until 1940 that a vaccine was developed. That vaccine is only given today if one travels to yellow fever areas. I don't believe it's part of the coctail given to new med students. Most Americans aren't inoculated.
In 2002 a man died of yellow fever in Houston, after visiting a part
of Brazil where it was endemic. Had an ordinary household mosquito bitten him before he was taken to the hospital, others could have contracted the fever. The World Health Organization considers a single case of Yellow Fever to be an epidemic. Had others in Houston contracted the fever, deaths would have of course, been much greater.
Nobody knows today the devastation 70% mortality would bring to America (economists believe that without the 1878 epidemic, Memphis would be in the position Atlanta is in today as the economic capital of the South).
Excuse me, I'm going to go out now and look for standing water around my home.
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