In Africa, at first, people believed Ebola wasn’t real, that it was a plot by the Deep State, that it was fake news, and that it wasn’t much to worry about and would go away. It makes a huge difference in the explosiveness of an epidemic.
He’s saying social distancing can really help, and that’s borne out by what I saw in West Africa. I am extremely glad that Anthony Fauci is speaking for the public health community in a position of authority. I think the average person should be very alarmed by the ineffectiveness of the federal government to get on top of this situation more quickly. Well I think there’s some validity to that view. Today, the public doesn’t have that faith. Outbreak is a product of the Nineties in one major way: It has a basic faith that the government is full of competent people working hard and doing their best to protect people.
Though this coronavirus, COVID-19, is a very different contagion than Ebola - including different methods of transmission and fatality rates - Rolling Stone caught up with Preston about the spread of coronavirus, how the bumbled response by officials mirrors what he saw around Ebola, and what the path forward might be. The book was a massive bestseller that completely changed how the world looked at pandemics, spurring action and discussion around bioterrorism and public health as never before in modern times in 1999, American Scientist named it one of the 100 or so books that shaped a century of science, alongside classics like Silent Spring and The Autobiography of Charles Darwin. The film was based on The Hot Zone, a 1994 nonfiction book by journalist Richard Preston about the very real Ebola virus, which he’d been reporting on in West Africa for several years. These can largely be traced back to the original virus-leaps-from-a-monkey-to-almost-destroy-humanity story: 1995’s Outbreak, in which Dustin Hoffman and Renee Russo play stoic government scientists racing against time to save humanity from a faceless, relentless enemy every bit as scary as Michael Meyers: the fictional Motaba virus. Not just in the real-life cases of other diseases including SARS and bird flu, but in movies like Contagion and 28 Days Later.
If the story of the COVID-19 outbreak seems familiar - a rare disease strikes a small area, only to become a deadly global pandemic - it’s because we have indeed seen it all before.
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