Novelist Dean Koontz predicted the COVID-19 in 1981

The argument

In 1981 the novelist Dean Koontz wrote 'The Eyes of Darkness, which foreshadows the COVID-19 pandemic with spooky accuracy. The similarities between the text and the current crisis, are too accurate to be coincidental, ranging from the named Chinese city of origin to global submission of an uncontainable virus. In the book, a mother finds out her son has been locked up in a secret military facility. There, he has become a human experiment for the man-made mirco-organism Wuhan-400. In Chapter 39, Koontz writes: “To understand it, you have to go back 20 months. “It was around then that a Chinese scientist named Li Chen defected to the US, 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 400th viable strain of man-made microorganisms created at that research centre." Later in the book, the similarities continue: “Wuhan-400 is the perfect weapon. “It afflicts human beings, no other living creature can carry it." “Just like syphilis, Wuhan-400 can’t survive outside a living body for longer than a minute, which means it can’t permanently contaminate objects or entire places the way anthrax and other virulent microorganisms can." “When the host expires, the Wuhan-400 within him perishes a short while later, as soon as the temperature of the corpse drops below 30C. They knew that the Chinese could use Wuhan-400 to wipe out a city or a country, and then there wouldn’t be any need to them to conduct tricky and expensive decontamination before they moved in and took over.” These labs could allude to Wuhan Institute of Virology. It is the sole level four biosafety complex in China, meaning it is where the country's deadliest viruses are studied. It is based just 20 miles from the Wuhan Seafood Market.

Context

(ALERT: Visit the WHO for accurate information about the coronavirus pandemic) Literature fans have spotted striking similarities between the coronavirus and a global epidemic described in Koontz's chilling literary classic.

Premises

Counter-arguments

There are several points of difference between the fictional virus and the COVID-19 outbreak. - All evidence points to the coronavirus starting in Wuhan Seafood Market as a result of human to animal interactions. Yet, in 'Eyes of Darkness' the virus is being developed in a secret laboratory as a biological weapon. In the novel it is man made, not a natural occurrence. - The fictional virus does not affect animals - yet, scientific consensus is that the real virus started in them. - Coronavirus has a relatively low mortality rate of 0.2%, compared to 100% in the novel. - In the book, the virus has a four hour incubation period. The actual virus' incubation period can be up to two weeks.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The detail the argument turns on is not in the 1981 text. The fictional agent was named for a Soviet city in the original edition and was renamed for Wuhan only in a later printing, after the book's Cold War framing was revised — so the coincidence being marvelled at was introduced by editing rather than foresight. [Rejecting P2] The specificity dissolves on comparison. In the novel the agent is a laboratory-built weapon that kills every host, cannot infect any other creature and incubates within hours; the actual virus has animal hosts, an incubation period measured in days to weeks, and a small fraction of that fatality rate. What survives the comparison is a place name — and selecting one novel out of decades of pandemic fiction after the event, then counting only the details that match, will find a prophecy in almost any large body of writing.