Long before the planet started running a temperature from a bad case of the flu, paradoxically resulting in submerged petty tyrants bubbling up from out of nowhere, film audiences were treated to the terrifying prospect of out-of-control bugs threatening mass extinction — yet, as far as we know, in contradistinction to contemporary political leaders, none of the audience members was prompted to flee hysterically from theaters.

Certainly quite a few stories and the movies made from them have had the theme of a plague (and, no doubt, many more are to come).  That disturbed genius Edgar Allan Poe established the trope for all time in his story The Masque of the Red Death (1842):

The 'Red Death' had long devastated the country.  No pestilence had ever been so fatal, or so hideous.  Blood was its Avatar and its seal — the redness and the horror of blood.  There were sharp pains, and sudden dizziness, and then profuse bleeding at the pores, with dissolution.  The scarlet stains upon the body and especially upon the face of the victim, were the pest ban which shut him out from the aid and from the sympathy of his fellow-men.  And the whole seizure, progress and termination of the disease, were the incidents of half an hour.

However, the well connected and well-to-do can insulate themselves from the devastation (and if that doesn't strike a modern note, then you're not paying attention to current events):

But the Prince Prospero was happy and dauntless and sagacious.  When his dominions were half depopulated, he summoned to his presence a thousand hale and light-hearted friends from among the knights and dames of his court, and with these retired to the deep seclusion of one of his castellated abbeys.  This was an extensive and magnificent structure, the creation of the prince's own eccentric yet august taste.  A strong and lofty wall girdled it in.  This wall had gates of iron.  The courtiers, having entered, brought furnaces and massy hammers and welded the bolts.  They resolved to leave means neither of ingress nor egress to the sudden impulses of despair or of frenzy from within.  The abbey was amply provisioned.  With such precautions the courtiers might bid defiance to contagion.  The external world could take care of itself.  In the meantime it was folly to grieve, or to think.  The prince had provided all the appliances of pleasure.  There were buffoons, there were improvisatori, there were ballet-dancers, there were musicians, there was Beauty, there was wine.  All these and security were within.  Without was the 'Red Death.'

A hundred and twenty-two years later, American-International Pictures and, in particular, director Roger Corman decided that while they were serially plundering Poe's royalty-free backlist to film the story, the resulting arsty-smartsy product being pretty good, actually.  The cinematography is excellent; the story, while insinuating another EAP story into the plotline, is still faithful to its source; and Vincent Price as Prospero (or almost anybody else) is always a treat.

Public health officers as heroes limns Panic in the Streets (Twentieth Century Fox, 1950), shot in that semi-doc style common to the era.  In the thirties, forties, and fifties, government agents were all the rage, their bona fides being unquestionable, their honesty and heroism assumed as a matter of course.  (The sixties would produce a sea change of opinion about that.)  Patient Zero presaging an unchecked pneumonic plague pandemic, in this case, is a homicide victim found on the New Orleans waterfront, and almost by chance do police detective Paul Douglas and public health officer Richard Widmark discover that the dead man has brought more death with him.  After his film debut pushing a little old lady in a wheelchair down a flight of stairs, Widmark started appearing in more sympathetic roles, of which Panic in the Streets is one of the early ones.  For filmgoers who know Zero Mostel only for his comic brilliance, his drop-dead serious role in this movie might be a revelation.  We agree with Variety:

This is an above-average chase meller.  Tightly scripted and directed, it concerns the successful attempts to capture a couple of criminals, who are germ carriers, in order to prevent a plague and panic in a large city.  The plague angle is somewhat incidental to the cops-and-bandits theme. ... There is vivid action, nice human touches and some bizarre moments.  Jack Palance gives a sharp performance.

Unlike our usual practice of seeing a movie first and then going to the book afterward, we read Michael Crichton's The Andromeda Strain (1969) and then sat back to view how badly the film (Universal, 1971) would mangle it.  Imagine our surprise at how closely the movie adheres to the novel.  We don't think we've ever seen a movie stick as tightly to its source material as director Robert Wise's version — which is all to the good, since to skimp on the technical material would have made the plot practically incomprehensible.  (We're pretty sure that any critics who panned the film did so from being scientific illiterates, as most of them seem to be.)  Crichton's story involves a novel bug getting loose from a de-orbited satellite and the feverish attempt on the part of a specialized scientific team to contain the disease before it wipes out...Beverly Hills?...millions?...all life on Earth?  Nobody knows for sure.  The choice of using second-tier, largely unknown actors as Everyman representatives in the major roles works greatly to the film's advantage.  The only thing that doesn't work is the flash-forwards to a time after the crisis has passed, which serve only to vitiate the suspense, which is still substantial, that the film manages to generate.

So there you are.  Three movies that should make you feel better about your situation and grateful that, despite what panicky politicians, entrenched bureaucrats, and crisis profiteers have been telling you, it was only a bad case of the flu after all.