An extract from a 1981 science-fiction book referred to a deadly "biological weapon" created in Wuhan, China to "wipe out a country or city", it has emerged.
It comes as coronavirus fears are high worldwide following the death of 2,700 people who contracted the killer bug which originated in Wuhan.
There have been over 81,000 confirmed cases of the deadly virus, with spikes recently seen in Italy, Japan, Iran and South Korea.
And a book from nearly 40 years ago, The Eyes of Darkness written by Dean Koontz, predicted a somewhat similar scenario to what has unfolded.
One chapter read: "To understand it, you have to go back 20 months.
"It was around then that a Chinese scientist named Li Chen defected to the US, 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 400th viable strain of man-made microorganisms created at that research centre."
The book continued: "Wuhan-400 is the perfect weapon.
“It afflicts human beings, no other living creature can carry it.
“Just like syphilis, Wuhan-400 can’t survive outside a living body for longer than a minute, which means it can’t permanently contaminate objects or entire places the way anthrax and other virulent microorganisms can.
“When the host expires, the Wuhan-400 within him perishes a short while later, as soon as the temperature of the corpse drops below 30C.
“They knew that the Chinese could use Wuhan-400 to wipe out a city or a country, and then there wouldn’t be any need to them to conduct tricky and expensive decontamination before they moved in and took over.”
However, there are major differences between the made-up outbreak and the coronavirus.
Wuhan-400 has a 100% death rate, while Covid-19 has a fatality rate of 14.8% with the over 80s, 8% with those in their 70s, 3% with people in their 60s, 1.3% with those aged in their 50s and less than 0.4% with anyone under the age of 49.
The book states that humans can only be affected, but it's believed the first cases of coronavirus came from interactions with animals.
And the Wuhan-400 only has a short four-hour incubation period, while Covid -19 requires an incubation period between two to 14 days.
