Contagion 🎥 2011 Movie Info

Plot Summary

Returning from a Hong Kong business trip, Beth Emhoff meets up with a former lover during a Chicago layover. She feels slightly ill; two days later, back home in Minneapolis, she suffers a seizure and dies from an unknown illness. Her 6-year-old son, Clark, also dies. Beth’s husband, Mitch, is isolated but found to be naturally immune. After being released, he quarantines his teenage daughter, Jory, at home. In Atlanta, Department of Homeland Security representatives meet with Dr. Ellis Cheever of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention over concerns that the disease may be a bioweapon.

He dispatches Dr. Erin Mears, an Epidemic Intelligence Service officer, to Minneapolis, where she traces everyone having had contact with Beth. She negotiates with reluctant local bureaucrats to commit resources for a public health response. Later, Mears becomes infected and dies, and is buried in a mass grave. As the novel virus spreads, citywide quarantine orders cause panic buying, widespread looting, and violence. At the CDC, Dr. Ally Hextall determines the virus is a combination of genetic material from pig and bat-borne viruses. Scientists are unable to discover a cell culture to grow the newly identified MEV-1. Cheever determines the virus too virulent to be researched at Biosafety level 3 laboratories and restricts all work to BSL 4 labs only.

Hextall orders University of California, San Francisco researcher Dr. Ian Sussman to destroy his samples. Believing he is close to finding a viable cell culture, Sussman secretly continues his research and identifies a usable cell culture from which Hextall develops a vaccine. Scientists determine MEV-1 is spread by respiratory droplets and fomites, with a basic reproduction number of four when the virus mutates; they project that 1 in 12 people on Earth will be infected, with a 25–30% mortality rate. Conspiracy theorist Alan Krumwiede claims he cured himself of the virus.

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