It seems like a familiar story. A bat drops a fruit, which gets picked up by a pig. The pig is slaughtered and cooked as a delicacy in a Hong Kong restaurant. An American tourist who eats it is found dead a few days later at her home in the US. Soon enough, the virus that kills her spreads quickly, wreaking havoc, subduing the might of the United States.
This story could have come from the dreadful archives of the coronavirus contagion of 2020. But no, it’s a story from a Hollywood film made in 2011, which in the wake of recent events, makes Stephen Soderbergh look more like a time traveller than the director of that presciently named movie called Contagion.
Interestingly, though Contagion was a creative expression of a medical attack crippling the world, it uncannily had a similar origin: China. It wasn’t surprising because SARS – another deadly virus – had previously originated from China. But there was a difference: when the deadly effect of SARS was building up inside China, the World Health Organisation in 2002 had warned of its consequences. China, under Hu Jintao, had begun to establish itself globally but wasn’t powerful enough to withhold information related to a pandemic.
