People are falling back on disease-themed movies to help cope with the coronavirus

Real life imitates reel life – rather somewhat eerily this time. Nearly ten years ago, American filmmaker Steven Soderbergh released his film Contagion. Like the coronavirus of today, the illness in the movie skips from animals to humans in China before spreading overseas.

Thanks to the fear and panic over the coronavirus, there is a new trend gaining currency: many people have evinced an interest in films and television serials that focus on disease. Some nervy viewers are falling back on documentaries and disaster flicks for answers and ways to cope.

The film Contagion stars Gwyneth Paltrow as a businesswoman who unknowingly brings a lethal pathogen to the United States after shaking hands with a Macau chef. The parallels with the global to-do over the coronavirus could not have been more telling. In the movie, however, the fatal ramifications are humongous and wider, with 26 million around the world dead in the first month alone.

In the last week of January, "Contagion" popped up in the top 10 of the British iTunes chart.

A boy wearing a face mask rides his bicycle on an overpass in Beijing. AFP

This week it has slipped down to 55 in Britain but remains stubbornly high up in many places — number 7 in Singapore, 24 in Australia and 20 in the US.

In Hong Kong — which features heavily in the film as the first city the virus runs truly rampant in — "Contagion" is sitting pretty at number 8.

The international financial hub has provided made-for-movie scenes in real life recently as panic-buying set in with runs on staples including rice, cleaning products and toilet rolls.

Earlier this week there was even an armed robbery of a delivery driver dropping off toilet tissue.

The city experienced 299 deaths during the 2002-03 epidemic of the SARS virus — a partial inspiration for Soderbergh's film — and has had two fatalities from the current coronavirus.

Stress reliever

But while Hong Kongers fret, many it seems are also keen to watch Hollywood's take on what a global pandemic might look like.

"The sudden interest in everything epidemic and virus-related allows people an avenue which can help to process what's going on," Robert Bartholomew, a medical sociologist who explores mass hysteria, said.

"It's well-known in psychology that the process of talking about traumatic events can help people 'get it off their chest' and relieve stress."

A woman wearing face mask is seen in Qibao, an old river town on the outskirts of Shanghai, China. Reuters

It is not just movies receiving a bump.

Last year Extra Credits, an educational YouTube channel, did a seven-part animation series for the 100th anniversary of the 1918 flu pandemic that killed millions worldwide.

Robert Rath, the channel's Hong Kong-based writer, said views have soared since the coronavirus outbreak, especially in Southeast Asia.

"Since January 1, the first episode gained over 100,000 views and the series as a whole gained over 330,000 views, which is dramatic for a YouTube video two years old," he said.

Collective coping

Meanwhile Netflix could hardly have better timed the release of its January docuseries "Pandemic", a look at how unprepared the world is for new viruses.

"People have said the docuseries 'Pandemic' came out at a perfect time," Sheri Fink, a journalist and doctor who was an executive producer on the series, wrote on Twitter.

Google searches worldwide for the series — as well as the "Plague" game and movie "Contagion" — have all skyrocketed in the last month.

Bartholomew says today's non-stop news cycle pushes people to the internet to make sense of their fears.

"People are now in the habit of going online and subconsciously reducing their psychic stress through a quasi-ritualistic practice that involves using a keyboard," he said.

"In the past, people might have gone to church and prayed, whereas today in a more secular age they go online and discuss their fears as a form of collective coping."