Viral Signs

Sometime in the third week of February, social-media networks lit up with the revelation that a little known 1981 book, The Eyes of Darkness, by the American author Dean Koontz, had predicted the outbreak of COVID-19—a new coronavirus discovered in central China’s Hubei province in December last year. Koontz’s book referred to a lethal man-made virus, created as a biological weapon, called “Wuhan-400.” Wuhan is the capital city of Hubei and ground zero for the ongoing epidemic of the pneumonia-like disease that was declared a global public-health emergency by the World Health Organisation on 30 January. As the relevant passages of the book spread online, it did not take long before it was revealed that the original edition of the book named the virus as “Gorki-400,” a reference to several rural Russian localities, and it was many years later that the name was changed. The damage, however, was done, and the idea that China had created the virus and then lost control took hold.

The ease with which the narrative around Wuhan 400 was accepted is symptomatic of the mistrust towards all pronouncements coming from China in the aftermath