Everyone loves a good zombie movie, or a good viral contagion movie, or really any movie
with an apocalypse and a hero and a sepia filter.
But it turns out that Hollywood doesn't always spend much time on proper science.
Here are things movies get wrong about virus outbreaks.
People slowly dying of a viral infection isn't very cinematic.
Hollywood needs its thrillers to be kind of thrilling, so it isn't surprising they tend
to jazz up how viruses typically work.
In the 1995 film Outbreak, the fictional Motaba virus isn't just 100% fatal, it also has an
incubation period measured in hours and kills its victims within a day.
While it's true that some viruses can kill you in about a day, there's a delicate balance
between speed and viability for a virus.
In short, viruses that kill you super fast not only destroy their own host, they can't
spread effectively either, so outbreaks tend to be pretty limited.
Even the fastest viruses tend to have incubation periods ranging from several days to several
years, and the illness part can last days, weeks, or months.
And fatality rates for most pandemics aren't nearly as lethal as Hollywood likes them to
be.
The H1N1 flu, also called "swine flu," was less than 0.1% fatal, while real-life Ebola
is 40% fatal.
That's pretty terrifying, but not terrifying enough for a Hollywood thriller.
The movie 28 Days Later is a prime example of how Hollywood likes its viral outbreaks:
fast and furious, with the world going from hunky dory to burned-out shell in just under
a month.
This obsession with speed also goes for the process of infection in 28 Days Later, victims
go from exposure to full-on infected almost immediately, and even less fantastic films
often depict people going from exposure to dead in a few days or hours.
But the fact is it takes about a full minute for your blood to circulate throughout the
body, so even if we stipulate a virus could get in and immediately start hijacking your
cells for its own purposes, it probably takes a minimum of a couple minutes to do so.
And in reality, pandemics take a long time, too, and so far not one has managed to actually
destroy the world.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention notes that the 1918 flu pandemic took a year
to play itself out, and the AIDS epidemic slow-burned for years.
Even something like the Black Death took four years to eventually burn itself out.
While it was devastating, it didn't end civilization.
One inconvenient fact about virus outbreaks is the length of time it takes to develop
a vaccine, so most films depict this happening unbelievably quickly.
Many movies will have a vaccine developed in a few days, or even hours.
Even the film Contagion, which is largely praised for its scientific accuracy in depicting
a fictional pandemic, shows scientists isolating the pathogen in less than two weeks and creating
a viable vaccine for it in a few months.
It's thrilling, and it seems like a reasonable timeframe, but it isn't.
In reality, the College of Physicians of Philadelphia reports it can take up to 15 years to develop
a vaccine, and even under emergency conditions it can take a whole year.
Creating a vaccine requires studying the pathogen, identifying the antigens that will help combat
it in the body, then testing to ensure that what you come up with isn't worse than the
pathogen you're trying to destroy.
After that, you need to manufacture the vaccine in significant quantities and actually get
it to the population.
Hollywood prefers to hit the Easy Button on this process.
This makes sense for dramatic purposes because you don't want the last hour of a movie to
be just one long shot of people working in a lab.
Movies often act like slapping a surgical mask on your face makes you invulnerable to
viral threats.
However, viruses tend to be tiny, and Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious-disease specialist
at Vanderbilt University, says the masks that can actually protect you make it incredibly
hard to breathe.
Regular surgical masks won't do much for an airborne virus but are often treated as nearly
magical in their ability to ward off disease.
Some movies do better depicting large-scale personal protective equipment, like full-body
suits with helmets that use positive air pressure to protect people.
But even when they show scientists and doctors using such equipment, you'll likely see a
million other mistakes like walking from an infected room to another area without decontaminating
or removing the helmet.
"Keep your helmet, Casey!"
"Keep it on!"
"Keep his helmet on!"
"No!"
"Don't let him expose himself, Casey!"
In the movie Outbreak, Colonel Sam Daniels is confused when the ebola-like Motaba virus
seems to be infecting people who haven't had any contact with other infected people.
It should be impossible because the virus is transmitted via physical contact and exchange
of bodily fluids.
Then he has one of those Hollywood genius moments.
He notices all the ventilation ducts in the room, and realizes the truth:
"Motoba is only spread through direct human contact, now you said that yourself, Sam."
"I know what I told you, but now I'm telling you we're facing a new strain."
In other words, the virus has mutated.
Viruses mutate all the time — that's how new forms of diseases keep cropping up and
how viruses that usually affect animals can cross over to the human population.
But what they don't do is start off being transmitted in one way, and then suddenly
go airborne via sneezing.
In the film I Am Legend, a virus basically turns people into vampire-zombies and leaves
Dr. Robert Neville as the only man alive.
Neville is somehow immune to the virus, and he uses his own blood to develop a cure.
The only problem is that it doesn't make any sense.
A genetic immunity like that can't be transmitted to others, and if Neville's immunity allowed
him to produce antibodies that would make this possible, first he'd have to be infected
so his body could produce those antibodies.
If you watched Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, you might have noticed a familiar phrase when
the virus is being explained: "Patient Zero."
"A lab tech now known as patient zero."
This phrase entered the general consciousness during the early years of the AIDS crisis,
usually referring to one flight attendant who was incorrectly portrayed as wildly promiscuous
and more or less responsible for the spread of the disease in the United States.
However, the concept of a Patient Zero is completely misunderstood.
In fact, the whole theory is wrong, as there were likely plenty of other HIV-infected people
at the time, especially considering the lengthy incubation period of the disease.
And as investigative journalist Dina Fine Maron points out, disease vectors are just
too complex for a single person to be blamed.
HIV probably arrived in the U.S. much earlier, possibly as early as 1971.
In other words, while Patient Zero sounds appropriately ominous for a movie, it's trash
science.
In World War Z, Brad Pitt figures out that the infected will completely ignore people
who have a fatal disease.
There is some logic to this, as a virus' main goal in life is to replicate.
A dying host would be a poor choice, and in nature, feigning death or infirmity to confuse
predators is fairly common.
However, viruses obviously aren't predators or capable of that kind of complex thought.
But as biophysicist Scott Forth at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute points out, the other
problem here is that the virus would need to imbue its host humans with superpowers.
The virus needs the host human to smell disease on the dying person, and we humans just don't
smell all that well.
In Hollywood movies, there's no such thing as a boring death scene.
When any character dies in a Hollywood epidemic, it's usually pretty exciting and kind of gruesome.
The goal is drama, after all.
When Gwyneth Paltrow's character kicks it in the film Contagion, for example, her horrified
husband watches her twitch and writhe as medical professionals look on more or less helplessly.
But most deaths from viruses like the flu stem from secondary factors, like bacteria
getting into the lungs to cause pneumonia or getting bacteria into the blood to cause
sepsis or because the virus exacerbates existing weaknesses like diabetes or asthma.
That's why most deaths from any viral outbreak happen among the elderly and the already ill,
not the young and healthy.
In other words, most people pass quietly, after lingering unconscious for a while, which
isn't very cinematic.
It's just tragic.
Audiences like to see extraordinary people accomplishing extraordinary tasks, like a
brilliant virologist who single-handedly figures out how to cure a deadly plague.
A whole bunch of films about various terrifying viral outbreaks feature a single, heroic scientist
who more or less saves the day, whether it's Dr. Neville in I Am Legend or Colonel Sam
Daniels, MD in Outbreak.
Even the relatively grounded and realistic Contagion features a single scientist developing
a vaccine, which she tests on herself.
Reality is messier and less dramatic, of course.
Abigail Zuger, M.D., Associate Clinical Professor of Medicine at Mount Sinai's school of medicine,
describes modern medicine, and especially public health efforts, as a "team sport."
The idea of a single genius saving the day is fun, but almost totally inaccurate.
The reality would be large teams of scientists working on these outbreaks, following some
pretty rigid protocols when it came to testing, and no one person would be responsible for
the solution.
The movies always like to imagine that our government agencies and bureaucracies are
incredibly well-funded, with access to cutting-edge technology and instantaneous data.
Even when the whole world is collapsing in a movie like World War Z, Brad Pitt knows
exactly where to go as he chases down clues.
In movies like Contagion, the scientists are able to pop up sophisticated models of the
virus' genome and show nifty videos where every single case of infection pops up on
a world map, and computers offer instant, terrifying projections of just how fast the
world will be consumed in a viral apocalypse.
"Power down the main screen and the work stations."
Powering down main screen and work stations."
Dr. David A. Ross, the president and CEO of the Task Force for Global Health, says the
reality is a messy process where some info comes in on paper, the rest digitally.
Most importantly, all of it comes in non-standard forms requiring sorting and manipulation.
That means the likelihood of instant, easily-understood computer graphics and reliable models showing
precise spread patterns is very, very low.
And that's assuming the data isn't coming from a secretive, paranoid totalitarian country
with an interest in fudging all the numbers.
Maybe we don't need to point this out explicitly, but zombies resulting from some sort of virus
are kind of unlikely.
Movies sure do love the idea of a "rage virus" or a zombie virus that reanimates us or turns
us into mindless killing machines and audiences love that idea, too.
Films like 28 Days Later and World War Z play with the idea that zombies, which are clearly
fiction, could become reality if the right pathogen mutated in the right way.
But nope, it's pretty much all fiction.
It's true that rabies the most frightening of all viral threats is theoretically capable
of producing a "rage virus"-like pandemic, according to some virologists.
But it would need to be a lot more contagious than it currently is to pose a global threat.
Rabies can only spread through physical contact, usually a bite from an infected creature.
And it has a very long incubation period of up to a year.
A true zombie-like experience would require a lot of work to make happen.
In his book The Zombie Autopsies, Dr. Steven C. Schlozman imagined a scenario where scientists
fuse a protein known as a prion to an airborne virus, resulting in a "zombie" disease.
However, the big takeaway from Schlozman's book isn't that such a plague is possible,
but that it would be incredibly unlikely to ever happen.
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