By JESSICA PAG-IWAYAN
COVID-19 is continuously spreading to different parts of the world. The virus, which originated from Wuhan in China’s Hubei province, has infected more than 100,000 thousand people and has killed 4,027.
As experts have yet to develop a vaccine, it is understandable that some people are now panicking—from panic buying things at the grocery stores up to hoarding different kinds of mask that are still available in the market. But there is hope. With new cases of COVID-19 being detected, there are also people who have successfully recovered.
Meanwhile, some bookworms remember Dean Koontz’s 1981 novel The Eyes of Darkness and couldn’t help but notice some eerily similar details. Koontz wrote about a biological weapon named “Wuhan 400,” and readers are saying it’s exactly like COVID-19.
“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,” Koontz writes in the novel.
Now, the similarities between “Wuhan-400” and COVID-19 are interesting. Both came from Wuhan, China, although the former is a biological weapon developed at a research facility in the area.
But som observers say that COVID-19 itself might have come from a similar research lab. According to a New York Times oped piece: “ may have leaked from a lab” called the National Biosafety Laboratory, that is part of the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
But the apparent similarities end there. In The Eyes of Darkness, the fatality rate of “Wuhan-400” is 100 percent, while reports say that COVID-19’s fatality rate—thank the heavens!—is just around two percent, with 50 percent of the infected individuals having fully recovered. Lastly, the fictional “Wuhan-400” has an incubation period of four hours, while COVID-19’s is between 14 to 27 days.