Things Movies Get Wrong About Virus Outbreaks

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. Keep watching the video to see all the things movies get wrong about virus outbreaks.

#VirusMovies

Viruses won't kill you immediately | 0:15
Epidemics aren't that fast | 1:15
Vaccines can't be created quickly | 2:15
Wearing masks won't protect you | 3:18
Viruses can't suddenly become airborne | 4:07
There's no magic blood cure | 4:53
There's no Patient Zero | 5:19
Viruses aren't smart | 6:11
No dramatic death scenes | 6:47
There's no lone genius | 7:33
Virus info isn't easily accessible | 8:26
Zombies aren't real | 9:31

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