Steven Soderbergh's strikingly prophetic and well-researched Contagion is just the film to watch right now (or not!)
A still from the 2011 film, Contagion. Pic /IMDB
Unsure of what to make of people with masks on, as I observe them at the airport, as we speak. It's not the first Indian sighting of such sort. The last was on Delhi's streets alone, a few months ago, alarmed as they were with the Capital's much-advertised pollution levels. Although having spent some time on the same streets, the respiration didn't seem volubly of a heightened degree to call for personal panic. But then again, who knows; until you experience it for longer.
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Maybe the Ninjas I notice with their faces covered in white, and only their Kathakali eyes pointed at people around, are wondering with a fair degree of judgment: "Boss, you're hanging around in the open, with no outer olfactory filters — you can be a little bit more concerned, right?" Right. We're obviously talking about possibilities of someone carrying Coronavirus — or what reads like brand-name for an end-year rave, COVID-19 — passing on their infection to all and sundry.
For one, there is respiratory transfer. This means we're breathing the same infected air. Or so I assume since my personal knowledge of medicine is only as good as a doctor's handwriting. The other route the virus could transfer is fomites. What's that? Objects — "elevator buttons, doorknobs, water fountains… And [thereafter] each other!" That's because you're picking up from the infected person's touch, from the same surfaces, and then touching your own face after.
Here's the thing we don't realise about our propensity to place our hands on our faces: "We do it two to three thousand times a day — three to five times, every waking minute!" Does that mean we're open to catching an infection every single minute? No. Depends on the possible infection.
How do we measure the spread of infection? Through what's known as R-Naught. Or Reproduction Rate Zero. The seasonal flu has R-Naught of one, which means each person infects one. Likewise, smallpox (before it got pretty much eradicated, due to counter of vaccines), had an R-Naught of four to six — scary.
No, I haven't been reading WebMD, or WhatsApp — something that humans should be advised against if their academic knowledge of medicine is so deeply poor. There's a reason professionals devote their entire youth and yet some more years to mastering textbook medicine. Our bodies are best left to their expertise.
To quote further from my source: "What we do know is that in order to become sick, you have to first come in contact with a sick person; or something they've touched. In order to get scared, you only have to come in contact with a rumour, or the television, or the Internet."
How about this — learn from the most learned of sources, a Hollywood movie, that I'm quoting from! Kidding. Or maybe not, if the film playing before you is Steven Soderbergh's Contagion (2011, on Amazon Prime). So you know, for one, that while dystopian and prophetic, like the best of science fiction can be, it is researched well enough for the doctors' community to have openly acknowledged how spot-on it was, with its writing (Scott Z Burns).
The virus in question, with the same R-Naught as Coronavirus, which is two, is called MEV1 — perhaps inspired by SARS, sounding closer to H1N1. Its symptoms include high temperature, cough, inability to swallow, and severe headache. Its first incidence takes place in Chinese-administered Hong Kong. There are various'index'/subsequent patients to be found in the West, including Chicago, where the lead character Beth Emhoff (Gwyneth Paltrow) perhaps contracts it from.
And this, as has been discussed by social commentators, is an inevitable outcome of globalisation — the fact that people are always travelling, and doing business the way they've never done before. You can't expect inter-related stock markets to boom/crash, but never affect the spleen in the human system!
While the initial conspiracy theories over the spread of MEV1 include the possibility of biological warfare, the chances of its origin from either pig or bat meat, seem fairly certain. Sounds familiar? Watch further (and watch again, if you have already), and no film — zombie or otherwise — will seem more resonant, as if it was daily news for nine years later!
Sure, the artistic vision is bleak. As are light bulbs of the screen, designed for theatrical audiences, rather than the cellphone (where I just watched). It's shot by a gentleman called Peter Andrews, which Wikipedia suggests, is actually Soderbergh's pseudonym when he takes up cinematographer's duties.
But that's Internet info. Without a doubt the web, social media in particular, has made viruses of the sorts of Coronavirus seem like a global pandemic — either before they already are — or made people cautious as they've never been before. What do I do with the masked fellows at the airport? Openly cough, like I naturally do (given smoker's lungs). They part way for me, to get to the top of the line at food-court, bar, security. It's a breeze towards boarding as well. Of course, I don't do that (it's a joke ya).
Mayank Shekhar attempts to make sense of mass culture. He tweets @mayankw14
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