Warner Bros
A dose of reality
Contagion
Dr Charlie Easmon, a specialist in public health, assesses how the stars of fictionalised pandemics stack up against real-world heroes
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ore than 30 years ago, I sat in the St George’s Medical School library in Tooting, south London, contemplating a framed cowhide that belonged to a beast called Blossom. The hide came from the cow that the great 18th-century physician Edward Jenner, the founder of immunology, used in an experiment to demonstrate his vaccine against smallpox. Fast forward 33 years and here we are during a pandemic that will last for many months to come. I have lectured on pandemics and was noted, at a conference of private school bursars, mostly ex-army types, for getting them to do the Mexican wave as a way of demonstrating the rolling spread of an infection – something that Boris Johnson’s advisors should have known when they failed to stop the Cheltenham Festival.
The actor Hugh Quarshie, my friend and fellow Ghanaian, who plays doctor Ric Griffin in Holby City, and I did synchronised “jaw drops” when the locked-down set of this show (and Casualty) donated its scrubs, gloves and other personal protective equipment (PPE) to the NHS. In the UK, the emperor has no PPE. This was epitomised by the brilliant Morten Morland’s Sunday Times cartoon in which health secretary Matt Hancock tells bemused medical staff: “You are all covering yourselves in glory.” And they mutter: “It’s all we have.” What do feature films and TV representations of my profession tell us about how to handle a global pandemic? Are the doctors and nurses hard-working and exhausted? Are the experts infallible voices of authority? Does everyone have the same plan? In real life, we have seen nations take different tacks while each has
