Summary
Dr. Orantes talks to public health officials in Hong Kong and suggests that the virus originated prior to transmission in Macau, perhaps in Hong Kong. "You're considering pronouncements with serious implications," one of them says.
The scene shifts to Day 14, and Erin is awoken in the night by a horrible cough. She takes her temperature frantically and becomes worried, convinced she has the virus, before calling the front desk and telling them she needs to contact the people who cleaned the room and the waiter who brought her room service the previous night. She calls Dr. Cheever and tells him she is sick, worrying that she infected other people. Cheever tells her to stay in her room and she tells him to send someone else to take her place, apologizing for not being able to finish the job.
Mitch visits a funeral home director, who tells him that they cannot take Beth and Clark's bodies. His daughter texts with her boyfriend, while Beth's mother tells Mitch that she wants to be buried with Beth and Clark. "They're not gonna take the bodies," he tells her, and Beth's mother tells him that Beth loved him very much, even if she made mistakes.
In a flashback, we see Beth at the casino in Macau calling Jon Neal. She leaves a message informing him that she can get a flight to Chicago for a five-hour layover if he would like. Beth accidentally leaves her phone on the bar, and the British woman who was one of the early deaths in the film gives it back to her. Orantes observes footage of this event from the casino, trying to determine the chain of contact.
They watch other footage, of Beth taking selfies with the men. We then see the young man who came down with the disease and got hit by the bus clearing Beth's drink after she leaves the table. Orantes proves that the disease originated in Hong Kong and asks to see Beth's itinerary again. Her companion, Sun Feng, suggests that America and France have a cure that they are marketing in secret, but Orantes dismisses this idea as a conspiracy theory from the internet. She asks him how his mother is, and he tells her that forsythia did not work and his mother died.
On their way out, Sun Feng makes a phone call to someone telling them they need to go ahead with the plan. When they arrive at their destination, some men grab Orantes and handcuff her in the back of a truck. They blindfold her and bring her to a structure in Sun Feng's town, where all of the survivors in his village are quarantined. "You stay here with us until they get a cure," he tells her, "You're going to get us to the front of the line."
Dr. Mears gets sent to a hospital; she is in critical condition. A doctor tells her that Cheever is having a difficult time coordinating an evacuation plan for her, given her illness. He gives her her phone and tells her that she should call Cheever if she feels up to it. Meanwhile, Cheever meets with Lyle Haggerty about evacuating Mears, but Haggerty suggests that it's too much work to get her out of there in her condition.
Haggerty tells Cheever that they are using a special military aircraft to transport a sick congressman, which is why they cannot transport Mears. The scene shifts to Alan Krumwiede at home. He records a video about having the illness and takes some forsythia to help with his illness. "If I'm here tomorrow, you'll know how it works," he says. Cheever calls his wife and tells her that 1% of the world population died of the Spanish flu, and that all the nurses are currently on strike. He feels personally responsible for Mears, but his wife wants him to have a positive outlook about Mears's condition. Suddenly, Cheever grows serious, and tells his wife to drive to Atlanta from Chicago immediately. "Don't tell anyone and don't stop," he says, before hanging up. After he hangs up, Cheever sees the janitor standing there, who says, "I've got people too. We all do."
We see Cheever's wife, Aubrey, collecting various items like hand sanitizer, batteries, and bottled water in a store, when her friend calls and asks why she did not come to dinner. Aubrey tells her friend that the flu scare is serious and that she's getting out of town. "I'm going to tell you something, and you're not going to repeat it," Aubrey says.
Day 18. We see Lorraine from The San Francisco Chronicle at a pharmacy trying to pick up forsythia, but the store has run out of doses. People begin to mob the counter, one person throwing a chair through some glass to get the forsythia. Meanwhile, Mitch drives past a liquor store that is on fire, then into a looted grocery store. They try to drive to Wisconsin, but the border is sealed, as the governor has declared a quarantine.
Analysis
Matters only get worse when the closest thing the film has to a protagonist, Dr. Mears, falls ill with the virus. While this was always a risk of her going to Minnesota to investigate the illness firsthand, her demise comes swiftly and proves to us that no one in the film, even the heroes, are immune from infection. Right until the end, Mears selflessly does her job, making sure to warn those with whom she has come in contact about the possibility of infection and telling Dr. Cheever to get someone else to come take her place.
The film's narrative remains tragic throughout this section of the film. More characters die, others receive more unsettling news, and everyone is divided by their fear of the disease. Soderbergh depicts the onset of a pandemic as scary not only because of its effects on health, but because of the paranoia and psychological toll it takes on everyone. The atmosphere of the film is one of sustained unsafety, with characters never knowing if they are protected from the virus. The resulting film becomes a relentless barrage of trauma and loss.
A curious side plot that emerges secondarily to the arc of the disease is the narrative of Beth's infidelity. After Mitch finds out that the funeral home will not take Beth's body, his mother-in-law tries to assure him that even if Beth was unfaithful, she loved him very much, as though the two situations are linked. We then see a flashback of Beth coordinating her meeting with Jon Neal over the phone while she is in Macau. Soderbergh seeks to join the structure of communicability with both travel and unfaithfulness. He draws clean lines between the first patients to get the disease, as we see Beth interacting with the British woman who also dies early in the film, and coordinating a stop in Chicago. Disease transmission, as the film portrays it, is at once arbitrary and meaningful, something that can happen accidentally or as the result of an indiscretion.
The film stages not only personal conflicts resulting from the disease, but also sociopolitical conflicts as well. For instance, in Hong Kong, Sun Feng worries about the fact that the more vulnerable populations in Hong Kong will be unable to get the cure, so he takes matters into his own hands, kidnapping Dr. Orantes and bringing her to a small hut where villagers are quarantining. In this subplot, we see the tensions emerging around global inequality, the fact that Western public health organizations are thought to prioritize the West at the expense of Asian countries, where rural populations like Sun Feng's fellow villagers live under more imperiled conditions. When he brings her to the quarantine hut, he tells her that she is going to "help get [them] to the front of the line."
The disease is portrayed as something that divides people more often than not. This occurs on a cultural and political level, as we see in the case of Dr. Orantes's work in Hong Kong; it occurs on a personal level, as we see in the case of Mitch Emhoff; and it occurs on an economic and bureaucratic level. After Cheever tells his wife to get in the car and drive to Atlanta, he turns around to find a janitor in his office staring at him and feeling betrayed. "I've got people too. We all do," the janitor says to the CDC worker, suggesting that everyone should be getting information about the disease and opportunities to protect themselves, regardless of their economic status or access to sensitive information.
