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- 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.
- Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.
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.
The movie's ending scene is revealed to be "day one" of the MEV-1 outbreak. It shows a logging company disturbing a bat, which flies out of the forest and into a pig farm, carrying a piece of banana.
Romeo Ranoco/Reuters
The bat drops the fruit (presumably infected with the virus) and a piglet eats it. The pig is later sold to a wet market vendor, who then sells the butchered swine to a casino restaurant in Hong Kong. The chef prepares the pork before shaking hands with Emhoff, infecting her and kick-starting the pandemic.
This is very akin to the way the Nipah virus spread to people in Malaysia and India.
The 2003 SARS epidemic, which killed 774 people, started in a similar manner. Chinese horseshoe bats passed the virus to civets sold at a wet market. People caught it from the civets.
De Agostini/Getty
In the case of the new coronavirus, the process was likely similar.
"There's an indication that it's a bat virus, spread in association with wet markets," Vincent Munster, a scientist at Rocky Mountain Laboratories, previously told Business Insider.
More research is needed in the case of coronavirus to determine which animal served as the virus' intermediary host. One group of scientists reported it could be snakes.
The opening scenes of "Contagion" depict day two of the virus' spread. A man in Hong Kong, China is the first to die from the illness, but a man in Tokyo and a woman in London die, too.
STR/AFP via Getty Images
By contrast, the first person to die of the new coronavirus, a 61-year-old Wuhan resident, didn't die until 11 days after the first case was reported. The virus also didn't spread outside of China until January 13, two weeks into the outbreak.
Cases have been documented in 20 other countries beyond China.
See the rest of the story at Business Insider
See Also:
- The number of Wuhan coronavirus cases has passed the SARS total after just a month. Here's how the 2 outbreaks compare.
- We're in an 'age of epidemics,' a scientist says. More diseases like the coronavirus will jump from animals to people.
- The outbreaks of both the Wuhan coronavirus and SARS likely started in Chinese wet markets. Photos show what the markets look like.
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