People Claim This Dean Koontz Novel Predicted the COVID-19 Outbreak as “Wuhan-400”

There are so many conspiracy theories about the 2019 novel coronavirus (now named as COVID-19) outbreak that it is hard to tell whether any of these is actually true at all. But there’s a recent impressive “prediction” that has gone viral because an old Dean Koontz novel appears to have predicted the COVID-19 outbreak with some accuracy! The virus involved in the novel is called “Wuhan-400”. And though the one in the movie had a faster incubation period and a 100% mortality rate, it supposedly happened in 2020 and that is the exact year we are in! The book, entitled “The Eyes of Darkness”, was published in 1981.

The bestselling suspense author Dean Koontz wrote the book that tells the story of a Chinese military lab that creates a virus as part of its biological weapons program. “They call the stuff ‘Wuhan-400’ because it was developed at their RDNA labs outside of the city of Wuhan, and it was the four hundredth viable strain of man-made micro-organisms created at that center,” explained Carl Dombey, one of the characters in the novel. The character went on to explain the scary characteristics of the Wuhan-400, saying that it can’t live without a human host of longer than a minute. “If I understand you, the Chinese could use Wuhan-400 to wipe out a city or country, and then there wouldn’t be any need for them to conduct a tricky and expensive decontamination before they moved in and took over the conquered territory,” another character, Elliot, said in reply. Did Dean Koontz Really Predict the Wuhan Outbreak? Eerily, there are many parts of the novel that appear to have really predicted the virus. There is a Wuhan Institute of Virology located just a few kilometers away from Wuhan City. Moreover, COVID-19 is believed to be unable to survive without a host after a few minutes; though it is believed to have come from animals before finding a human host. But according to Mashable, as impressive as the book might have been in “predicting” the Wuhan outbreak, the novel had a Russian biological weapon named “Gorki-400” when it was first published. It was only in later publications that the antagonists became Chinese, the locations moved the China, and the virus renamed to “Wuhan-400”.