"COVID CENTURY – The Pandemic Preparedness Dilemma" - RIIFF 2022 SCREENING

115 Empire Street,Providence RI 02903

13 August, 2022

Description

COVID-19 claimed millions of lives and brought the world to a temporary paralysis. Was it really inevitable that the pandemic would take on such an extent? The film highlights key moments of the first ten weeks after the discovery of the new disease. They were crucial to the pandemic's global spread. Jeremy Farrar, one of the world's leading scientist, says, "We could have stopped the pandemic." In most peoples’ memories the Covid-19 pandemic started in the first weeks of spring 2020. But the decisive period for why the outbreak in Wuhan turned into an epidemic that took a global starts much earlier. In a previously unseen manner, the investigative film by Michael Wech puts under close scrutiny the events around the first ten weeks immediately following the outbreak. It shows how the Chinese authorities withheld crucial information and impeded for weeks any attempt to share the identity of the new pathogen with the international community. This fatal delay circumvented global containment strategies hindering the development of much needed diagnostic tests and vaccines. Audio recordings of confidential WHO meetings from early January 2020 presented in this film reveal that the Chinese authorities initially left the higher echelons of the World Health Organization clueless about what actually happened in Wuhan. Likewise, however, the WHO missed crucial moments to setting the course by taking sides with China in downplaying the obvious possibility of human-to-human transmission at a time when scientific proof was widely available. Once China changed its course and introduced drastic measures by locking down the city of Wuhan political elites and decsion-makers from the West who met at the World Economic Forum in Davos at that time, failed to understand the signals and discounted the evident threat. Because subsequent warnings of German scientists indicating cases of asympotmatic transmission and silent spreading were ignored and even publicly denied by the World Health Organization the virus could continue to seep in undetected in Europe and the United States. In precisely retelling the ten weeks before the official proclamation of the pandemic in March 2020 the film presents a forceful countdown up to the catastrophe that has disrupted everybody’s life. The film tells this story in a character-driven narration following protagonists that have take an active part in trying to overcome the obstacles put up by authorities, governments and international institutions. While being tough and critical the documentary is no account of the pandemic in hindsight. It underscores in an accurate manner how the knowledge about the new disease steadily grew and how scientists used informal global networks rapidly to make up for the complacency of politicans world-wide. Could the world have been better prepared for countering the threat of a potential pandemic? Why were precious weeks and months lost in the begining – the only window of opportunity to stop the epidemic in its tracks? The documentary sets the stage for those protagonists who during the very first weeks put together the puzzle of fragemented information coming out of Wuhan and conceived the knowledge derived from the slow but steady flow of scientific studies to understand the magnitude of threat the world was to be facing. „By 20th of January, the world knew what the world needed to know to act“ says Jeremy Farrar, renowned scientist and director of the Wellcome Trust. By miniscule reconstruction of the succeeding weeks, the film shows what opportunities were lost and why encouraging examples like the response of South Korea which steered through the pandemic without imposing any nation-wide lockdown were not apprehended. NO EXCHANGES OR REFUNDS. ALL SALES ARE FINAL. QUANTITIES ARE LIMITED AND MAY SELL OUT AT ANY TIME