Daily Times

“In around 2020 a severe pneumonia-like illness will spread throughout the globe, attacking the lungs and the bronchial tubes and resisting all known treatments. Almost more baffling than the illness itself will be the fact that it will suddenly vanish as quickly as it arrived, attack again ten years later, and then disappear completely.” This is an excerpt from The Eyes of Darkness authored by American novelist, Dean Koontz. It was published in 1981. The social media is going crazy over the fact that it has predicted the spreading of the Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) nearly 39-years before it had spread. However, that is not the only coincidence. Koontz also writes in the novel, “…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 the RDNA labs outside the city of Wuhan…” I believe there are no coincidences. Actions happen because of the divine plan or a well-researched man-made objective spanning years of in-depth study. The Coronavirus spreading in “2020” and the disease originating from China’s city of Wuhan is no fluke, to say the least.

What if, this novel was a look into the future and how the super powers of the world plan to release a virus in the said period. Another novel, Inferno, authored by Dan Brown, published in 2013, revolves around the protagonist, Robert Langdon, as he tries to find a US billionaire, Bertrand Zobrist. To control the world’s growing population, Zobrist engineered a disease. One paragraph, referring to overpopulation in the book, reads, “Consider this. It took the earth’s population thousands of years-from the early dawn of man all the way to the early 1800s-to reach one billion people. Then, astoundingly, it took only about a hundred years to double the population to two billion in the 1920s. After that, it took a mere fifty years for the population to double again to four billion in the 1970s. As you can imagine, we’re well on track to reach eight billion very soon. Just today, the human race added another quarter-million people to planet Earth. A quarter-million. And this happens every day-rain or shine. Currently, every year, we’re adding the equivalent of the entire country of Germany.” Zobrist believes that once humanity reaches the point of critical mass, it will not sustain human life, as the resources available on Earth will be the far less than that of the humans.

Zobrist is also a staunch supporter of the Population Apocalypse Equation. It states that ideally, the world is perfectly habitable for 1.5 billion human beings as the resource utilization will be at its optimum. Because of a rapid increase in population and with the figures over seven billion, civilization is collapsing. In another chapter of the same book, Dan Brown writes, “For Bertrand Zobrist to describe the Black Death as the best thing ever to happen to Europe was certainly appalling, and yet Langdon knew that many historians had chronicled the long-term socioeconomic benefits of the mass extinction that had occurred in Europe in the 1300s. Prior to the plague, overpopulation, famine, and economic hardship had defined the Dark Ages. The sudden arrival of the Black Death, while horrific, had effectively “thinned the human herd,” creating an abundance of food and opportunity, which, according to many historians, had been a primary catalyst for bringing about the Renaissance.”

When we look at the reality transpiring around us following the days of the Coronavirus outbreak, we can see a pattern. The disease is spreading like wildfire, stock markets are crashing, air travel has been suspended and cities have gone into a complete lockdown. One might ask if these novels had a connection with reality. What if there was planning of such an outbreak of disease four decades ago. A million minds breed a million questions and this one is as pertinent as any other that surfaces from a conspiracy theory. While the global economy was rattled by the Coronavirus, Dow Jones went down -9.5%, Nikkei by -10.6% and FTSE 100 by -14.6%. Car sales in China fell by 92% in the first two weeks of February as people resorted to living at home and business transactions were halted. Major banks have cut their forecasts for the global economy while the sporting events have been cancelled or are being held without spectators. Life on Earth as we speak has entered into a transformation. Universities are taking online classes and people are asked to avoid going in public places. Is the dystopia we all feared finally upon us?

The writer is an independent researcher, author and columnist