A new strain of coronavirus is now ruling the world’s disaster and all the researchers around the world are uncertain about any end time of the pandemic. Well, the new strain is different from all of the evolved viruses in any of virus families in its infection and transmission, as it is spreading unpretendingly showing late symptoms in healthy individuals.

    Predictions from the history

    The history of coronaviruses other than the present coronavirus (which is named as SARS-COV-2 as well as COVID-19), is known since 1960s when scientists identified this as a new human pathogen. The virus was later classified in different groups based on extensive research on different hosts and sources of the virus, and that’s how a new family of virus originated. The years from the 1960-1980s were, therefore, hot years in terms of research on coronavirus family, and mostly researches were published on children and animal hosts. Just not this, the virus was not only in headlines in most of virology labs but also came in the news due to its epidemic infections and local infections occurred in children around 1965-1966. Apart from this during 1970-1980 a lot of active research was going in the labs focusing on human respiratory virus infections and coronavirus was studied the most of it. Therefore, it can be said that coronavirus was in the top headlines of research labs at that time.

    Obviously, we are not going into details of history coronavirus discovery and its infections that were originated at that time, but surely, we will look into the reality of what coronavirus of 2020 pandemic gives the points about those predictions and up to which extent those predictions make sense?

     From The eyes of Darkness by DEAN KUNTZ


    Well, a lot of posts have been published about some predictions that people usually link with coronavirus and everyone is trying to write on it and share their ideas. So, let’s look into it. The most prominent of the social media headlines regarding coronavirus is a paragraph from a book of an American fiction and thriller writer Dean Kuntz. The novel called “The eyes of Darkness” in which he wrote that,
    "To understand that," Dombey said, "you have to go back twenty months. It was around then that a Chinese scientist named Li Chen defected to the United States, 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 four-hundredth viable strain of man-made microorganisms created at that research center."

    The quotation is a story described by a fictional character in the novel mentioned above. People have gone made on social media since they have seen this paragraph and started resembling it to the present-day pandemic of coronavirus which originated in Wuhan China. Although the original 1981 print of the novel states the name of the virus as “Gorki-400” instead of Wuhan-400 according to google books record of this novel and the target in that case were Russians instead of Chinese. In the late editions the name was then changed to Wuhan-400. In my view the writer picked the name Wuhan-400 from a Chinese book published in 1984 named as “Achievement of Education in China. Statistics 1949-1983” as the writer is an American, and Americans shifted their competitive opponent from Russia to China after 1980s putting impact on the writer’s mind. And may be that’s the reason that he later changed the name from Gorki-400 to Wuhan-400 and Russia to china in his novel’s new editions.

    Another point that can be made to untrue the claim of COVID-19 as part of the bio-terrorism game and predicted earlier is that the features of the virus described in the book are far too different from the COVID-19. The virus mentioned in the novel is deadly up to 100% but the death rate of COVID-19 is just 2-3%. Further COVID-19 shows late symptoms after 2-14 days of contact but the virus mentioned in the novel show infection time as just four hours and living time after infection as just 24hrs. In contrast, COVID-19 patients unless immunocompromised do not die in 24hrs.

    Apart from the comparison, let’s get to the point that it is just a prediction in a fiction novel and the writer is an educated experienced and well-known writer. People will think that what the predictions have to do with the writer’s nature and personality? Yes, I think that’s the point which people don’t understand. The points to learn is that fiction writers and novelist always write based on their experience in a field or the knowledge they possess about a certain field. In most cases, they replicate what is happening in society and based on their present knowledge circle they make predictions. The explanation I am giving is to clarify that at the time when Dean Kuntz was writing this novel, human viruses most importantly coronavirus and other molecular biology researches were hotlines of science press, and being an expert novelist and writer, Dean wrote using his knowledge which he had at that time about the viruses and bioweapons. And it is an obvious fact that writers do so. For those who still have doubt, Dean Kuntz is still alive and can be asked about what he was thinking at the time of writing this novel. In short, Dean’s prediction is not part of a bioweapon game and is just part of a science fiction story from the great mind of the writer.

    SYLVIA BROWNIE’s Prediction


    Another writer wrote in a book named “End of Days: Predictions and Prophecies about the End of the World”, that a pneumonia-like illness will originate in 2020 and there will be no known treatments for it. People started comparing to COVID-19 and quoted this as part of the bioweapon game. Although she didn’t write into the details of the illness but her bunch of the words “pneumonia-like illness” came from past pandemics like SARS and MERS which were in 2002-2003 and the book is published in 2008. Another evidence of the falsity of this claim that COVID-19 is predicted in this book that COVID-19 is not resistant to all treatments as China and WHO along with CDC has claimed certain drugs working up to most extent against COVID-19 and of which Favipiravir had encouraging effects against the virus.

    Thus, it can be concluded that coronavirus of 2020 named as COVID-19 is not what people think as part of bioweapon or bioterrorism between economic powers of the world based on the above predictions. The 1st prediction shows the knowledge and expertise of writer in science fiction writing and 2nd prediction shows that the writer just followed the past story of a pandemic and described it into new words giving it some time, like using the words “around 2020”. Moreover, with this large gap of research in knowing the full activity of the virus, no knowledgeable person can claim this as part of the world economic superpowers’ game.