Elwood and I were talking about maybe watching the movie Contagion together, and it made me think about the ways that fictional plagues are different from actual plagues. Books like The Stand and Station Eleven had prepared me for a pandemic in which everybody got the disease quickly and severely, and lo-- actual viruses don't work like that. (Or at least not yet? It feels a little jinx-y to type that out loud.) Things that make more sense almost a year into an actual pandemic: a virus as contagious and as virulent as the ones in those books would kill all of its hosts too quickly and have nowhere to go, and human bodies are pretty good at fighting off infections.
This would make a lousy novel in a lot of ways, this yearlong anti-festival of uncertainty and heartbreak and boredom. ("I miss going places," said Stella this weekend.) But plenty of it has also been too strange for fiction. If I had read a novel in which government officials said "what if we just let 'er rip?" in the face of a pandemic with the potential to cause a seven-digit number of deaths in the US alone, I would have thought they were too cartoonishly evil for plausibility. I wonder if we would have had more buy-in for containment measures if the virus had been more deadly. Neither The Stand nor Station Eleven featured any long-haulers: either you got it and died, or you didn't and lived. The things most of us didn't know about epidemiology going in -- that 1% is a grievously high mortality rate, that there is usually a sizable middle ground between fine and dead -- I wonder if those things could have shifted the landscape.
I would not have believed the vaccine part of this hypothetical novel either. "Come on," I would have said, "vaccines are hardly ever >90% effective! And you want me to believe that you just knocked together two of them and got FDA approval for them both in less than a year? No, that would never happen." Hypothetical Me reading this hypothetical novel might also have said, "Come on! You give your characters two improbably effective vaccines and NO PLAN WHATSOEVER for distributing them? I don't buy it!"
But here we are, living our actual lives instead of reading a hypothetical novel. The last time I read a dystopian novel (Leave the World Behind) it reminded me forcibly that there is plenty of dystopia in the here and now. I don't know if I will watch Contagion or not. If I do, I'll be sure to take notes so we can discuss.
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