My family was gripped by a TV drama in the 1970s called Survivors. In the show, most of the world’s population is annihilated by an accidentally released virus, which was the creation of Chinese scientists. The virus is hyper-virulent, killing 4,999 of every 5,000 people it infects. It is also hyper-transmissible, spreading between people with ease and traversing the globe with infected people on passenger jets. The series, which followed the fate of those few who survived the outbreak, and the development of a post-apocalyptic society, was more akin to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road than, say, Steven Soderbergh’s 2011 film Contagion, which depicts societal breakdown during a killer virus emanating from Hong Kong.
Mankind has always feared pestilence. After all, for most of humanity’s history, infections killed nearly everyone. Only in the past century or so have we been able to defeat an increasing number of the germs that afflict us and live long enough for our hearts to go wrong or our cells to become cancerous.
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