What a view | Pandemic: Netflix docuseries about threat of global outbreak and its eerily prescient timing
- The six-part series follows overworked, underfunded but somehow still positive experts trying to keep us safe
- Complacency comes from anti-vaxxers, whose failure to inoculate puts the lives of others at risk
But hey: without such wilful stupidity we wouldn’t have the opportunity to be scared senseless by six-part Netflix documentary Pandemic: How to Prevent an Outbreak , which could pass for a horror film.
Given today’s population and world travel links, the next contagion is likely to kill “hundreds of millions”, says one scientist, quietly, where one might expect him to be understandably shouty about the calamity that, in the shape of today’s coronavirus, might already be here.
From Vietnam to Guatemala, the Congo, India, Egypt, Lebanon, the United States and beyond, we meet the overworked, overwhelmed, underfunded but somehow still mostly positive doctors, nurses, biotech experts, field workers and others trying to keep the rest of us safe. Meanwhile, special mention is reserved for “China … where we’ve seen the emergence of virtually all the deadly influenza viruses over the last half-century”, says Dr Dennis Carroll, director of the United States Agency for International Development’s (USAid) Emerging Threats Unit.
