Contagion how does it end

Healthcare professionals, government officials and everyday people find themselves in the midst of a pandemic as the CDC works to find a cure. Soon after her return from a business trip to Hong Kong, Beth Emhoff dies from what is a flu or some other type of infection. Her young son dies later the same day. Her husband Mitch however seems immune. Thus begins the spread of a deadly infection. For doctors and administrators at the U.

Centers for Disease Control, several days pass before anyone realizes the extent or gravity of this new infection. They must first identify the type of virus in question and then find a means of combating it, a process that will likely take several months.

As the contagion spreads to millions of people worldwide, societal order begins to break down as people panic.

Beth Emhoff Gwenyth Paltrow returns from a business trip to Hong Kong with a stop over at the Chicago airport, where she has sex with her former lover.

Beth feels ill, but thinks the problem is jet leg. But in , this kind of well-functioning government seems like science fiction. Then the administration diverted funds from the CDC budget to house detained migrant children. Even the position of secretary of Homeland Security is in flux; Chad Wolf, the current acting chief, is the fifth to hold the interim position. In the closing scenes of Contagion , thanks mostly to the efforts of its government-funded doctors and researchers one of whom injects herself with the virus, to better evaluate the effectiveness of a cure , a vaccine is developed, tested, and mass produced.

We learn that a birthday-based lottery will be used to deploy the vaccine, with randomly chosen, numbered ping-pong balls read aloud on live television, to most fairly determine who will get treated first. The idea of such an easy, structured ending is borderline comical. Already a subscriber? Log in or link your magazine subscription. Throughout the film there is the suggestion that the virus might be a bioweapon , but that idea is never validated.

The birds are doing that. It turns out to be caused by an interaction between a bat and a pig — a pig that winds up in the kitchen of the Hong Kong casino in which Beth Emhoff spends her last night in town. Throughout history, many deadly viruses have jumped from one species to another — from birds to people, or from pigs to people or from birds to pigs to people.

Interspecies interactions are a major breeding ground for new terrifying viruses. Contagion is available now on Netflix.