From Contagion to Outbreak to even The Walking Dead, pandemics are popular in modern entertainment. As the global community confronts the coronavirus/COVID-19, the first pandemic since 2009's swine flu, some people are proposing that Dean Koontz's 1981 novel The Eyes of Darkness predicted the outbreak nearly 40 years before the first cases in Wuhan, China. The book depicts a fictional virus/bioweapon known as "Wuhan-400," whose shared place of origin with the coronavirus has led conspiracy theorists to believe Koontz prophesied the current infection.

However, aside from the city of origin, there are actually few similarities between the coronavirus/COVID-19 and Koontz's Wuhan-400. The virus in Koontz's horror-thriller is described as a bioweapon that attacks the brain with an extremely fast incubation period of just four hours and a lethal mortality rate of 100 percent. The novel also notes that Wuhan-400 was designed to wipe out entire cities or countries.

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By contrast, the real-life coronavirus, which triggers flu-like symptoms including fever and shortness of breath, has a longer average incubation period of about 14 days and a much less scary mortality rate of 2 percent to 3 percent. Although evidence on its exact origins is conflicted, with initial reports linking the virus to "wet-markets," it is clear the coronavirus was never meant for biological warfare.

The final difference between the two viruses is the most devastating to conspiracy theorists. The original version of the killer virus in The Eyes of Darkness was entitled "Gorki-400," after the Russian locality where Koontz initially planned to set his novel's bioweapons lab. When the Soviet Union fell in 1991, however, Koontz recalibrated his novel to feature China as the source of the virus. Previews of the first edition of the book published under Koontz's pseudonym, Leigh Nichols, on Google Books, shows the virus' original name was Gorki-400.

Yet, Dean Koontz's novel isn't the only book fueling conspiracy theories. An excerpt from self-proclaimed psychic Sylvia Browne's 2008 book, End of Days, circulated online alongside Koontz's. Browne's prediction, which some initially thought came from Koontz's novel, states, "around 2020 a severe pneumonia-like illness will spread throughout the globe, attacking the lungs." This description is actually much more in-line with coronavirus than Koontz's Wuhan-400, since COVID-19 causes respiratory issues and persisted from the end of 2019 into 2020.

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Before conspiracy theorists become too consumed by Browne's book, however, it is important to note that while she rose to prominence for her many psychic claims, she had also been under fire on numerous occasions for making false predictions. As a result, it's safe to take Browne's prophecy with a grain of salt. Plus, since the psychic released her book just a few years after the SARS epidemic ended in 2003 and the same year the early studies on the Swine Flu/H1N1 made scientific headlines, Browne's prediction could be attributed to a simple educated guess.

It may be disappointing to discover that someone or something did not predict the current global outbreak. But in the case of debunking conspiracies around Dean Koontz's 1981 novel, we can at least find comfort in knowing the coronavirus does not eat through brain tissue like battery acid and that the biggest global concerns today are postponing or canceling public events, not the annihilation of entire cities and countries.

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