US Author Dean Koontz
More than 1700 people have died in China because of the coronavirus outbreak. The Chinese city Wuhan is the epicenter of the virus which has now spread to over 25 countries.
There is a claim that US Author Dean Koontz predicted the 2020 new coronavirus outbreak in his 1981 novel “The Eyes of Darkness.“An excerpt of the novel by the best selling suspense author is making rounds on social media and the netizens are baffled.
What’s True
An image shows a genuine page from Dean Koontz’s novel “The Eyes of Darkness” containing the words “Wuhan-400.”
What’s False
Dean Koontz did not predict an outbreak of a new coronavirus. Other than the name, this fictional biological weapon has little in common with the virus that caused an outbreak in 2020.
Origin
When readers first came across a biological weapon named “Wuhan-400” in Dean Koontz’s novel “The Eyes of Darkness,” we doubt anyone had the notion that the famous thriller author was “predicting” a real-world outbreak of COVID-19, coronavirus disease. But in February 2020, after such an outbreak had occurred, eagle-eyed Koontz fans shared this passage as if the famous thriller author was a prognosticator.
A Dean Koontz novel written in 1981 predicted the outbreak of the coronavirus! pic.twitter.com/bjjqq6TzOl
— Nick Hinton (@NickHintonn) February 16, 2020
This is a genuine page from the novel “The Eyes of Darkness.” The passage can be seen in Amazon’s preview of a mass-market paperback edition of this novel that was released in December 2008.
It’s true that Koontz named a fictional biological weapon “Wuhan-400” in this novel. It’s also true that Wuhan, China, is the city at the center of the 2020 coronavirus outbreak. However, that’s pretty much where the similarities end.
Why the prediction gets wrong :
- In Koontz’s novel, “Wuhan-400” is a human-made weapon. The coronavirus, on the other hand, was not.
- In the novel, “Wuhan-400” has a 100% fatality rate. While researchers are still learning about the coronavirus, the current fatality rate sits at about 2%.
- The fictional “Wuhan-400” has an extremely quick incubation period of about four hours, compared to COVID-19 which has an incubation period between two and 14 days.
More bad news for this prediction.
While the page from Koontz’s novel displayed above is genuine, other iterations of this book used a different name for the fictional biological weapon. In fact, 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.
We’re not entirely sure when or why this change occurred. From what we can tell, the biological weapon was originally called “Gorki-400” when this book was published in 1981. But by 2008, the name had been changed to “Wuhan-400.”
Regardless of when “Wuhan-400” made its way into Koontz’ novel, this is not a prediction. Koontz did not claim that the events that took place in his novel would later come to fruition, and the similarities between “Wuhan-400” and COVID-19 are minimal. Furthermore, readers only noticed this “prediction” after an outbreak of coronavirus was reported in Wuhan, China, which makes this “prediction” nothing more than a coincidence.
