James Corden enjoys homecoming drinks with Dominic Cooper and Justin Theroux in as he's pictured for the after The Late Late Show's last episodeīest Actor nominee Martin Freeman, 51, joins girlfriend Rachel Mariam, 29, during rare red carpet appearance at the BAFTA TV Awards 2023 The book also describes a virus that has an incubation period of just four hours, whereas coronavirus incubates for several days to two weeks.įinally, to the disappointment of conspiracy theorists, it turns out that in the first edition of The Eyes Of Darkness, the virus was originally called 'Gorki-400', after the Russian city where Koontz originally wrote the bioweapons lab.Īfter the Soviet Union fell in 1991, Koontz apparently changed later editions to make China the villain. The primary symptoms are fever, coughing, and shortness of breath.

It destroys the part of the brain that controls all of the body's automatic functions.'Ĭoronavirus, on the other hand, primarily affects the respiratory system, in severe cases resulting in pneumonia. In the Koontz novel, the Wuhan-400 attacks the brain.Īs one character describes it: 'The virus migrates to the brain stem, and there it begins secreting a toxin that literally eats away brain tissue like battery acid dissolving cheesecloth. It can survive on surfaces for much longer than a minute, possibly hours or days, though scientists are working now to determine such properties with more precision. And like syphilis, Wuhan-400 can't survive outside a living human 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,' one character says.Ĭoronavirus however has an estimated mortality rate of just 2 to 3 percent. The characters explain that the Chinese intended to use it 'to wipe out a city or a country' without the need for 'expensive decontamination'.

In The Eyes Of Darkness, Wuhan-400 is a bioweapon virus that has a fatality rate of 100 percent within 12 hours. Other than the city of origin, however, there is little similarity between the fictional Wuhan-400 and the real coronavirus. Initial theories suggested that it jumped to humans from exotic animals in a Wuhan 'wet market.' Others have suggested, so far without proof, that the pathogen may have escaped from the Wuhan Virology Lab, China's only biosafety-level four facility. Says one character in the novel: 'They call the stuff 'Wuhan-400' because it was developed at their RDNA labs outside the city of Wuhan'

Dean koontz down in the darkness