But, if we’re being honest, calm isn’t why anybody comes back around to “Contagion.” It’s having our pressure spiked. Panic is a draw. And Soderbergh is the right guy to goose the dismay. He’s always practiced a filmmaking of neurotic compulsion: the doomsday obsessions of Andie MacDowell in “Sex, Lies, and Videotape” and James Spader’s complementary erotic fetish; the way Soderbergh essentially color codes his movies in blues, oranges and reds. I used to think the tinting was to help us follow all the story lines; now I think it’s to help him feel organized, that every element is in its place.

Soderbergh’s OCD flag really flies in “Contagion.” The introduction of every city receives a head count: “Tokyo, population 36.6 million,” “Minneapolis, population 3 million.” Toward the end of the opening sequence, the camera peers down from Paltrow to the bowl of airport-bar peanuts at her elbows. It follows her credit card as it goes from her fingers to the attendant who swipes it. Anytime a hand touches a door knob or a pole on a subway or a bus, the camera and editing basically go “ewww.” For the severely infected, the camera angles go sideways and the images warp and blur.

At some point, a scientist played by Elliott Gould sits in a restaurant after spending a lot of brain power thinking about a vaccine and watches a waiter yawn while drying glasses and a coughing woman take a swig of water. Gould’s reaction is a face he had to invent for the occasion. It’s worth noting that Soderbergh does his own cinematography; those are basically his eyes boinging out of their sockets.

After 45 minutes, my delight subsided. I remembered why I was watching this again. And the gravity of it all set in — deeper than something terrifying like the “28 Days” zombie movies, although not as movingly as a novel like “Station Eleven” or the archival footage AIDS documentary “How to Survive a Plague.” The movie’s potential death toll — 70 million, somebody says — seems high compared to what officials are surmising about Covid-19. But people are dying. The striking nurses and empty gyms, malls and airports; the panic to flee: It all feels real. The movie doesn’t predict the racism and xenophobia that have broken out in the United States. (Maybe you saw the clip of a nincompoop newsperson asking whether we could get the virus from Chinese food.) Instead, it has desperate Hong Kong villagers kidnap an important white lady in order to get them to the front of the vaccine line.

Speaking for those who’ve rehelped ourselves, I’m glad I did. There have been moments in the last few weeks when I’ve felt we might be paranoid. Everything smells of hand sanitizer and people are testing their core strength to surf the subway-car turbulence lest they have to grip a subway pole. The other day, I watched a businessman wipe an entire train seat with disinfectant and then park himself in it before it dried. I thought we might all be Julianne Moore in “Safe,” suffering from a disease we might not actually have.