Contagion - Blog Assignment 5

The movie, Contagion, directed by Steven Soderbergh, follows the spread of a new and fatal virus throughout the world as the CDC, government, and Public Health officials scramble to control and stop it. While the virus began by only first infecting a few, the slow response from the Public Health system combined with the mutating and contact-spread nature of the virus, millions were infected throughout the world. As more and more people died, with as many as 1 in 12 people around the world being infected, those involved in disease control worked to understand the disease, prevent panic, create a vaccine, and distribute it to the masses to stop the virus in its tracks.

            This was my first time watching Contagion, and I found myself recognizing many things throughout the movie that I’ve seen in the Public Health course. From epidemiologists being called in to investigate the virus to Public Health officials determining the best ways to prevent the spread of the disease without causing panic in the public, this movie put into action many of the Public Health concepts we’ve been learning and reading about. Thus, not only was the movie entertaining and fun to watch, but it really made these concepts come to life and allowed me to see them in action.

The outbreak of the virus, which is defined as the abrupt increase in the number of cases, in Contagion occurred when the virus first began infecting and killing people, since this was a disease not yet seen before. Once the virus had its outbreak, an outbreak investigation took place. In this investigation, a number of steps were taken from mapping the spread of the outbreak to developing hypotheses as to how the disease spreads and how to protect against it. Specifically, the public health and CDC officials in Contagion conducted their investigation and figured out that the disease spreads through contact, with an initial reproduction number of 2, which grew to 4, collected data of infected and death rates, and developed ways to slow down spread, eventually creating and distributing the vaccine to prevent it. However, before the vaccine was created, the Public Health and CDC officials put into place practices of isolation and quarantine to protect those who still hadn’t been infected. Isolation occurs when the sick and infected are separated from the healthy to prevent exposing them. In Contagion, the sick were isolated into hospitals and into large facilities. Additionally, those who were only exposed to the virus, but still had not shown symptoms, were quarantined, which means to restrict their movement and thus the spread of the disease, as to additionally help to prevent the virus from spreading.

One of the areas in which the public health agencies could have been better prepared in Contagion was in the hospital facilities and staffing. Early in the outbreak of the disease, hospitals became filled up and the infected had to be crammed together in last minute pulled together facilities. The infected quickly exposed both other patients in the hospitals as well as nurses and doctors because enough facilities were not available to isolate the victims initially. Because of this, the infected exposed those who were trained to help the sick, just making the problem worse. Eventually, those helping the sick were prepared with full body suits and those infected with this particular virus were isolated, but this should have been done much sooner. This did not happen because these hospitals were not prepared, both facility wise and staffing wise, to contain the sick and prevent them from infecting those within the hospital system.

Additionally, problems arose during food distribution, which exposed a lack of preparedness in this area as well. Although there was some prepackaged food available for people to obtain during the process of vaccinations, this supply was limited and poorly organized. Because of this, not everyone received it, causing panic, and leading to violence in order to get a hold of the few resources available. Thus, public health agencies were not prepared in both number of supplies as well as in controlling the distribution. Being better prepared would have involved having a much larger supplies of food available and creating a better organized system so that the distribution could have been monitored and better controlled as to prevent stealing from others.