Soderbergh knew all about a new pandemic

The United States has 70,000 cases of coronavirus to date, and about a thousand deaths from the pandemic. Several states have already decreed population containment and the economic consequences have yet to be quantified. Since Americans realized the seriousness of what was happening a few weeks ago, when their president was still joking about the real scope of the issue, pay-per-view platforms have experienced a very remarkable phenomenon that speaks to the public's concern to seek information beyond the headlines of televisions and newspapers. A film that is about to turn a decade old has suddenly become the most downloaded and viewed in streaming, something that is not usual in the audiovisual market where only novelties reach the top of the list of demands. Contagion, directed by Steven Soderbergh in 2011, is today the most demanded film in the Warner Bros. catalogue and the second most viewed film in the last month, going from 270th position in that ranking to second, and being placed in the top ten in platforms such as Amazon Prime Video, iTunes or the cable giant Comcast. 

The similarities between what Contagion exposes and the situation of the current health emergency are enormous. The only difference is the lethality of the virus, which is reflected in the fictional story. The spread of the so-called MEV-1 begins in an Asian country, has an animal origin, and due to a series of circumstances derived from the global situation ends up affecting all countries. A field hospital with beds several metres apart is set up in record time on the pitch of a sports hall. The story shows how patient zero is sought by reconstructing the movements of the first infected and why it is so important for the health authorities to discover it, in order to detect the animal origin of the pathogen. Politicians spread the advice of scientists about keeping social distance on the streets, working from home whenever possible, the need to wash hands and wear a mask and gloves whenever out on the street. The work of virology experts around the world, connected by that technological universe that is invisible to other mortals, is as fundamental as it is now, their personal sacrifice and dedication, taking risks that will be decisive in the fight against the disease. And also the opportunists who do not have any ethics and seek wealth and popularity by hurling harangues that damage the health of the population even more. Great movie stars such as Matt Damon, Kate Winslet, Laurence Fishburne, Marion Cotillard, Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow or Bryan Cranston are turned into ordinary people who change their lives for small details such as grabbing a doorknob, holding a drink between their fingers or being next to someone who has coughed. 

Scott Z. Burns is the screenwriter and main author of the story, which was inspired by his father's fear that the avian flu that broke out between 2004 and 2006 would become a threat to the survival of the world's population. He has worked with Soderbergh on several films such as The Snitch (2009), Side Effects (2013) and The Laundromat, Dirty Money (2019), the latter about Panama's roles, and in all of them there is a condemnation of the system and the abuses of the political and business elites. Burns has also directed The Report (2019), on torture in post-9/11 CIA interrogations. He is a filmmaker, born in Minnesota, where the story and research of MEV-1, the deadly virus that traps those infected and ends their lives in a very high percentage and in a very short time, is set.

Soderbergh and Burns have had conversations in recent days in which they have shared their concern about the increase in sales of a miracle product, the elderberry, whose healing properties with respect to the coronavirus are not proven, but which are very reminiscent of the use of forsythia that the character of Jude Law, an unscrupulous blogger, recommends in the film. No health ministry has recommended the use of this substance that supposedly strengthens the immune system. All are parallels between the fictional story that the two filmmakers built and the current reality. And how once the outcome is produced, which we save for all readers who seek this attractive title for their mandatory confinement, the virus is stored at a very high temperature next to SARS and H5N1 in laboratories that will keep the patent in case it is necessary in the future to use it for scientific purposes. 

Soderbergh led the campaign for the film's release, predicting that a global pandemic would occur in an undetermined but near-term timeframe. Uproxx critic Mike Ryan interviewed the Atlanta-based director when the film was released, and his words are prescient. He has now retrieved paragraphs from the interview on his Twitter account:
 

Soderbergh discovered while documenting his story that "there were two major things that were disturbing. One is that everyone I spoke to told me that 'we're going to get a big [pandemic]. The second evidence he found was that "some of the stories of people who went out and threw themselves into situations, and knowing how politics prevented them from doing their job, is really depressing. 

The director of Sex, Lies and Videotapes has not granted any interviews at this time because he claims to respect the quarantine in a very scrupulous way. Burns has, however, acknowledged in statements made a few days ago with the revival of mass interest in Contagion that the scientists he spoke to in preparation for the film considered that the question was not whether there would be a pandemic, but when it would occur. Separating the wheat from the chaff in the statements that both the scriptwriter now and the director made nine years ago about the film and the real context, and leaving the traditional attack on Republican presidents, very common among people in Hollywood, for the benefit of stocktaking, does not cease to generate concern knowing that the scientific community has been predicting this scenario for so many years through the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which was the main source for research that was used to document Contagion. And how the different administrations have ignored these warnings, not realizing the reality until a microbe has taken hold of the entire planet.