The American author Dean Koontz wrote a thriller about a man made virus outbreak which started in Wuhan China in 1981.

His novel The Eyes of Darkness made reference to a killer virus called “Wuhan-400” – which just so happened to be the Chinese city where Covid-19 would emerge.

The virus in The Eyes of Darkness was originally called Gorki-400; its name was changed in a 1989 reprint, most likely because with the end of the Cold War China was a more obvious enemy than Russia.

Conspiracy theorists have claimed it was a prediction of the coronavirus, but the virus in the novel is also quite dissimilar to the real life disease.

Wuhan-400 is described as having a “kill‑rate” of 100%, developed in labs outside the city as the “perfect” biological weapon.

The fictitious Wuhan-400 also has an incubation period of four hours. As described by Koontz it “literally eats away brain tissue like battery acid dissolving cheesecloth.”

The real-life coronavirus, which triggers flu-like symptoms including fever and shortness of breath, has an incubation period of several days to two weeks and its mortality rate is between 2 percent and 3 percent.

An account with more similarities, also credited by some as predicting coronavirus, is found in the 2011 film Contagion, about a global pandemic that jumps from animals to humans and spreads arbitrarily around the globe.

An excerpt from self-proclaimed psychic Sylvia Browne’s 2008 book, End of Days, also 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.

Before becoming too consumed by Browne’s book though, 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.

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 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.