You know, if I was going to write/run a zombie outbreak story (I'm not, but bear with me) and near the beginning of the story, I said "…and then one of the members of the news crew that 'US Patient Zero' was on decides to break quarantine to pick up some food at the local Peachy Keens Buffet," people's fairly legitimate response would be "OH COME ON."
Except this is, as we see, entirely plausible.
Because people are fucking stupid.
You can't count on much, but you can always count on that.
NBC Chief Medical Correspondent Nancy Snyderman, apparently not a fan of Ebola quarantines, is now under police surveillance after she was spotted out in public in New Jersey last week.
I don't know why, but we seem to have higher standards of 'realism' for the motivations of fictional people than we do for real people.
Granted, she deemed herself asymptomatic, and therefore non-contagious (as we understand Ebola), it's still a stupid and dickish move — and, yes, just what people roll their eyes over as lame plotting in movies and books.
Truth is stranger than fiction because fiction needs to be plausible.