Some social media posts also have an excerpt from another novel which appears to have predicted the outbreak - End of Days: Predictions and Prophecies About the End of the World by Sylvia Browne. The fictional Wuhan-400 virus has an incubation period of four hours, where COVID-19's has been measured between two and 14 days, with some reports it could be even longer.
COVID-19 is fatal in around 2 percent of cases. Koontz's novel also says Wuhan-400 has a 100 percent fatality rate. But by 2008, the name had been changed to ‘Wuhan-400.’”ĬTVNews.ca has contacted the publisher for comment on the matter.The virus described in the science fiction novel differs dramatically from the real coronavirus/COVID-19 outbreak.ĬOVID-19 outbreak originated inside the city of Wuhan, and conspiracy theories that the virus was manmade have been debunked.Ĭontrary to Konntz's Wuhan-400, COVID-19 can infect animals and is thought to have jumped from animals to humans in a live food market. From what we can tell, the biological weapon was originally called ‘Gorki-400’ when this book was published in 1981. “We’re not entirely sure when or why this change occurred. “When we searched a 1981 edition of this book available via Google Books we found no references to “Wuhan.” In that edition, this biological weapon is called “Gorki-400” after the Russian city where it was created,” reads the Snopes investigation. The fact-checking website also notes that while the 2008 publication of the book mentions Wuhan, other iterations of the book used a different name for the fictional weapon. The coronavirus is not, despite online rumours suggesting the new virus was created in a lab early on in the outbreak.įact-checking website Snopes points out that in the novel, the “Wuhan-400” virus had a 100 per cent fatality rate, whereas the current coronavirus fatality rate sits at about two per cent. While the novel includes mention of Wuhan, China, the epicentre of the coronavirus outbreak, the book’s fictionalized outbreak is far from reality.įor starters, the “Wuhan-400” virus from the novel is a human-made biological weapon. “They call the stuff Wuhan-400 because it was developed at their RDNA labs outside of the city of Wuhan,” reads a passage from the book, which can be seen on Amazon’s preview of the paperback edition of the novel published in December 2008. Segments of the novel have been shared widely on social media over the last week, showing eerie similarities between the COVID-19 virus and the book’s fictional outbreak called “Wuhan-400.” A passage from author Dean Koontz’s 1981 fictional novel “The Eyes of Darkness” has gone viral for purportedly predicting the real-world outbreak of the novel coronavirus.
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