Actually, maybe the second or third scene, the first ominous note after a more cheerful opening establishing the main characters.
But this was me sitting in the car with our two youngest kids, waiting for my wife who had run into the supermarket to get a few things. I had NPR on, and heard:
The fictional character, however, would not really have much of a reaction to the news. Whereas I was like “ohhh no that’s not good”.
“When hell is full, the dead will walk the Earth.”
This happened in the mid-90’s, when the Hantavirus story first broke wide. I turned on my car’s radio to hear: “…and there is no known cure for the mysterious virus that has killed 14 people so far. Coming up in sports and weather…”
I was literally screaming: “FUCK the sports and weather! GET BACK TO THE KILLER VIRUS!!”
OP, you haven’t seen enough disaster movies; the first character in the first scene always dies of the bug, which TPTB deny exists for another 45 minutes of movie time. Then the head authority figure catches it and expires and the remaining heroes shove the compressed-air canister into the shark’s mouth and BOOM! $750,000,000 opening weekend.
LOL, right? I forgot about the hantavirus…that was scary too. But we are still here, so that actually makes me feel better.
You’re right, I have so much to learn! 
We’re still here after AIDS, SARS, the Plague, misc. viruses of the month… and Killer Bees crossing the border illegally.
I think my Apocalypse Meter pegged a year ago and now I’m just waiting to see what kills us, but I’m all out of worry.
ETA: Does that mean I’ll be one of the first to go in your disaster movie?
Wait, can’t I be John Cusack in “2012”?
Innocent bystander who survives thanks to Luck Beyond Even Cinematic Credibilty?
I had a similar experience when the SARS-CoV came through. There was some question as to whether a contagious case had come in through Dulles airport from China. And there I sat, in the waiting room of an ER not ten miles away, with a friend who was coughing her lungs out.
After the second hour, when a kid with an out-of-joint finger was taken back, I had to go give a stern “What are you thinking?” to the triage nurse.
I mean, make us wait, sure, nobody is bleeding here, but put us away from the 50-odd others in the waiting room. Are you seriously going to let her cough all over these kids and their parents for another hour BEFORE you ascertain that this is not the killer virus?
Where are the priorities here? Unfortunately, those who most deserve it probably will not be the ones to suffer.
I don’t know if this helps, but this isn’t the first time Ebola has appeared in cities. In the 2013 outbreak, it appeared in cities. It’s not good news that it’s present in an urban environment, but we have muddled through before. Hopefully we will again.
Yikes :eek:
Huh. Why is this WHO scientist saying it’s the first urban Ebola outbreak?
I’m not sure that I’ve ever had that sort of experience, but, years ago, my mother did.
In 1980, I was in high school, and my bedroom was across the hallway from my parents. I had a clock radio, usually set to the local top-40 station. I was the first person awake in the house on schooldays, but sometimes my alarm would be going off for a minute or so before I’d be fully awake, and turn it off.
On this particular morning, as my alarm went off, the Queen song “Flash” was playing. My mother woke up to the sound of my alarm; half-asleep, she heard a voice on my radio:
Before she was fully awake, my mother thought to herself, “Am I sleeping through something very important?”
Heh.
I think there are a couple of stories that have been poorly edited that state that this is the first urban case. They mean that it’s the first urban case of this outbreak, not the first urban case ever, but not all the reports are careful to make that distinction. If you read up on the 2013 outbreak it lasted 3 years, and killed 11,000+ people. It was a major outbreak. The WHO, and innumerable other agencies, deserve all kinds of credit for keeping that as contained as it was.
They have 300,000 stockpiled vaccinations of something that seemed to help somewhat during the last outbreak. I imagine they’re planning to use that. I believe that there is another test vaccine that also looks promising that they are planning to roll out for this as well.
I think it was the first urban outbreak in The Congo. There’ve been quite a few in rural areas there.
It’s the Zaire strain, which is not good. It’s the most lethal known strain, with death rates ranging up to 90%. Outbreaks of this variant have been tracked since 1975.
I looked for information on whether “zaire” has been in urban environments before, and I couldn’t find any (doesn’t mean it hasn’t been - I didn’t spend that long on it). If it hasn’t been, that could be the point of concern. Zaire is the deadliest known variant and having it in an urban environment is cause for concern.