Epidemiologist Ian Lipkin, who served as the medical consultant on Steven Soderbergh’s Hollywood drama “Contagion”, has tested positive for the coronavirus.
The movie, about the spread of a highly contagious and deadlyvirus, has come back in public consciousness as the world grapples with thecoronavirus. The film, predictably, is enjoying a spike in popularity.
Lipkin, 68, revealed he had tested positive for the virusduring an interview with Fox Business. He said he had an idea of where hecontacted the virus but declined to elaborate further, reported IndieWire.
“I would like to say on this show tonight, this hasbecome very personal to me, too. Because I have COVID as of yesterday. It’smiserable. If it can hit me, it can hit anybody. That’s the message I want toconvey,” he said during the interview.
“It’s extraordinarily important that we harmonize whateverrestrictions we have across the country. We have porous borders between statesand cities and unless we’re consistent, we’re not gonna get ahead of thisthing…What New York, Chicago and Washington have done has been very, veryhelpful and I would like to see that implemented broadly across the UnitedStates,” he said.
Lipkin, who serves as the director of Columbia University’sCenter for Infection and Immunity, was one of the leading figures in thescientific studies of the West Nile virus and the SARS coronavirus in the early2000s.
He had also visited China in January during the coronavirusbreakout there and had self-isolated himself for two weeks. Lipkin warned aboutthe virus turning out to be a pandemic, which it has become, spreading todifferent countries around the globe.
Lipkin had agreed to work on Soderbergh’s movie because thefilmmaker promised to accurately “represent the science” behind the spread of avirus.According to JohnsHopkins twebsite, the total number of coronavirus cases stand at 436,159globally. The epidemic has killed 19648 people around the world since it firstemerged in China in December.