Coronavirus is officially a pandemic, so people naturally feed their anxiety by watching movies and reading books about other epidemics. Some of the plots are very similar to what is happening now, and some people use the Internet to claim that some narrators have “predicted” the outbreak of coronavirus.
One particularly notable example is in the thriller of Dean Koontz’s “The Eyes of Darkness”.
In a widely shared tweet, someone said that Koontz had predicted a coronavirus epidemic based on a photo of one page of the book. But to say that Koontz predicted everything that was going to happen is a bit false. That novel is fiction, though.
The answer is: No, Dean Koontz did not predict coronavirus in his 1981 novel.
CNN writes about a ‘conspiracy theory’ created in connection with the 1981 book “The Eyes of Darkness”, which mentions biological weapons and is linked to a coronavirus.
The book is about a human-made virus
On one page of the novel, a character called Dombey tells the story of a Chinese scientist who brings biological weapons “Wuhan-400” to the United States.
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“To understand that you have to go back twenty months. It was around then that a Chinese scientist named Li Chen defected to the United States, carrying a diskette record of China’s most important and dangerous new biological weapon in a decade. They call the stuff ‘Wuhan-400’ because it was developed at their RDNA labs outside the city of Wuhan, and it was the four-hundredth viable strain of man-made microorganisms created at that research center”, Dombey said.
First, it is important to note that in the original 1981 version of “The Eyes of Darkness,” the weapon was called “Gorki-400” in that Russian locality. The name of the weapon was changed to “Wuhan-400” when the book was republished in 1989, according to the South China Morning Post.
The coronavirus epidemic has indeed erupted in Wuhan, China. But the idea that the virus was made in the lab is actually a conspiracy theory that originated in unverified social media posts and has since been dismissed by scientists from both China and the West.
A Dean Koontz novel written in 1981 predicted the outbreak of the coronavirus! pic.twitter.com/bjjqq6TzOl
— Nick Hinton (@NickHintonn) February 16, 2024
Experts are still trying to figure out the real source of the virus. Still, research indicates that it probably originated in bats and settled with another host before moving on to humans.
The mortality rate of the virus in the book is 100%
In a later paragraph, Dombey says that none of the infected survived: Once infected, no one lives more than twenty-four hours. Most die in twelve. Wuhan-400’s kill rate is 100%.”
This is not, however, the case for coronavirus. First of all, people infected with coronavirus generally develop symptoms about five days after exposure, and almost always within two weeks, as a recent study shows.
It is the Wuhan Code and something has warned us before….. pic.twitter.com/M8LwipPIjK
— Envirolab (@SafeTravel10) February 19, 2024
Second, coronavirus mortality is nowhere near 100 percent. Although the virus can be deadly, it is most often the case in older people and those with weakened immune systems or other health problems.
The official estimate of mortality from this virus, based on known information, is between three and four percent globally and is expected to decrease.
Me running to the library for @DeanKoontz book pic.twitter.com/isZOA6uu59
— Beaker247 (@beaker247) February 19, 2024
So Koontz is not a psychic as social media users think.
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