In both “Contagion” and “The Hot Zone”, when confronted with a potential pandemic in the United States, the government downplayed how lethal the virus could be to avoid panic. With pandemics in the past the even if the government didn’t say anything the potential lethality of a virus still got out and caused widespread panic. This led to people causing riots, and the government not being able to control the population. In Contagion when the government was confronted with a virus that could start a potential pandemic they refused to tell the public the amount of lives that the virus had already taken up to that point to stop people from panicking even more than they already have. The government also did not tell the public about the virus when they first find it because they thought i would just go away and they didn’t want to worry people about nothing. When representatives from the government were on the news they tried to say the least amount about the virus as possible as to not have people panic over it, but still inform the…show more content… The governments in both the movie and novel never told the public how many people had died from the virus to stop people from panicking and causing mass hysteria. In Contagion social media was a big threat to the government because of how information could be shared from 1 person to millions and since this information was faulty it caused unnecessary panic, but as for the Hot Zone having someone spreading false information would have been way harder because there wasn't really social media back then. In Contagion the government got backed into a corner and had to end up telling the population that there was a pandemic, but in the Hot Zone they never told anyone about it until years after the pandemic was
