Right now everyone is very concerned about the Coronavirus being a threat to human life. Everyone is being panicked whoever and wherever from s/he is. It does not matter whether it is rich or poor country. Already corona-virus has emerged as the pedantic issues. Doctors, scientists and researchers are working tirelessly to discover the preventive measures though still no fruitful results have been revealed. Surprisingly there is a discussion found about a virus which is termed as WUHAN-400 in the book titled "The Eyes of Darkness" published in the Year of 1981 by DEAN KOONTZ. Many of us are being confused about Wuhan-400 and COVID-19 but they may not the same diseases. Because Koontz mentioned the Wuhan-400 as to attack the brain system but COVID-19 has been found to attack the human respiratory system especially lungs. Anyway, symptoms of COVID-19 have been provided here-sourced from WHO.
Unit-39
" JACK MORGAN'S STRATEGY OF FLYING WITH THE land instead of over it was a smashing success. Alexander was increasingly confident that they would reach the installation unscathed, and he was aware that even Kurt Hensen, who hated flying with Morgan, was calmer now than he had been ten minutes ago.
The chopper hugged the valley floor, streaking northward, ten feet above an ice-blocked river, still forced to make its way through a snowfall that nearly blinded them, but sheltered from the worst of the storm's turbulence by the walls of mammoth evergreens that flanked the river. Silvery, almost luminous, the frozen river was an easy trail to follow. Occasionally wind found the aircraft and pummeled it, but the chopper bobbed and weaved like a good boxer, and it no longer seemed in danger of being dealt a knockout punch.
“How long?” Alexander asked.
“Ten minutes. Maybe fifteen,” Morgan said. “Unless.”
“Unless what?”
“Unless the blades cake up with ice. Unless the driveshaft and the rotor joints freeze.”
“Is that likely?” Alexander asked.
“It’s certainly something to think about,” Morgan said. “And there’s always the possibility I’ll misjudge the terrain in the dark and ram us right into the side of a hill.”
“You won’t,” Alexander said. “You’re too good.”
“Well,” Morgan said, “there’s always the chance I’ll screw up. That’s what keeps it from getting boring.”
***
Tina prepared Danny for the journey out of his prison. One by one, she removed the eighteen electrodes that were fixed to his head and body. When she gingerly pulled off the adhesive tape, he whimpered, and she winced when she saw the rawness of his skin under the bandage. No effort had been made to keep him from chafing.
While Tina worked on Danny, Elliot questioned Carl Dombey. “What goes on in this place? Military research?”
“Yes,” Dombey said.
“strictly biological weapons?”
“Biological and chemical. Recombinant DNA experiments. At any one time, we have thirty to forty projects underway.”
“I thought the U.S. got out of the chemical and biological weapons race a long time ago.”
“For the public record, we did,” Dombey said. “It made the politicians look good. But in reality, the work goes on. It has to. This is the only facility of its kind we have. The Chinese have three like it. The Russians … they’re now supposed to be our new friends, but they keep developing bacteriological weapons, new and more virulent strains of viruses, because they’re broke, and this is a lot cheaper than other weapons systems. Iraq has a big bio-chem warfare project and Libya, and God knows who else. Lots of people out there in the rest of the world they believe in chemical and biological warfare. They don’t see anything immoral about it. If they felt they had some terrific new bug that we didn’t know about, something against which we couldn’t retaliate in kind, they’d use it on us.”
Elliot said, “But if racing to keep up with the Chinese –or the Russians or the Iraqis –can create situations like the one we’ve got here, where an innocent child gets ground up in the machine, then aren’t we just becoming monsters too? Aren’t we letting our fears of the enemy turn us into them? And isn’t that just another way of losing the war?”
Dombey nodded. As he spoke, he smoothed the spikes of his moustache. That's the same questions I’ve been wrestling with ever since Danny got caught in the gears. The problem is that some flaky people are attracted to this kind of work because of the secrecy and because you really do get a sense of power from designing weapons that can kill millions of people. So megalomaniacs like Tamaguchi get involved. Men like Aaron Zachariah here. They abuse their power, pervert their duties. There’s no way to screen them out ahead of time. But if we closed up shop, if we stopped doing this sort of research just because we were afraid of men like Tamaguchi winding up in charge of it, we’d be conceding so much ground to our enemies that we wouldn’t survive for long. I suppose we have to learn to live with the lesser of the evils.”
Tina removed an electrode from Danny’s neck, carefully peeling the tape off his skin. The child still clung to her, but his deeply sunken eyes were riveted on Dombey.
“I’m not interested in the philosophy or morality of biological warfare,” Tina said. “Right now I just want to know how the hell Danny wound up in this place.”
“To understand that,” Dombey said, “you have to go back twenty months. 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 their RDNA labs outside of the city of Wuhan, and it was the four-hundredth viable strain of man-made microorganisms created at that research centre.
“Wuhan-400 is a perfect weapon. It afflicts only human beings. No other living creature can carry it. 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. And when the host expires, the Wuhan-400 within him perishes a short while later, as soon as the advantages of all this?”
Tina was too busy with Danny to think about what Carl Dombey had said, but Elliot knew what the scientist meant. “If I understand you, the Chinese could use Wuhan-400 to wipe out a city or a country, and then there wouldn’t be any need for them to conduct tricky and expensive decontamination before they moved in and took over the conquered territory.”
“Exactly,” Dombey said. “And Wuhan-400 has other, equally important advantages over most biological agents. For one thing, you can become an infectious carrier only four hours after coming into contact with the virus. That’s an incredibly short incubation period. Once infected, no one lives more than twenty-four hours. Most die in twelve. It’s worse than the Ebola virus in Africa –infinitely worse. Wuhan-400’s kill-rate is one hundred per cent. No one is supposed to survive. The Chinese tested it on God knows how many political prisoners. They were never able to find an antibody or an antibiotic that was effective against 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 destroys the part of the brain that controls all of the body’s automatic functions. The victim simply ceases to have a pulse, functioning organs, or any urge to breathe.”
“And that’s the disease Danny survived,” Elliot said.
“Yes,” Dombey said. “As far as we know, he’s the only one who ever has.”
Tina had pulled the blanket off the bed and folded it in half, so she could wrap Danny in it for the trip out to the Explorer. Now she looked up from the task of bundling the child, and she said to Dombey, “But why was he infected in the first place?”
“It was an accident,” Dombey said.
“I’ve heard that one before.”
“This time it’s true,” Dombey said. “After Li Chen defected with all the data on Wuhan-400, he was brought here. We immediately began working with him, trying to engineer an exact duplicate of the virus. In relatively short order we accomplished that. Then we began to study the bug, searching for a handle on it that the Chinese had overlooked.”
“And someone got careless,” Elliot said.
“Worse,” Dombey said. “Someone got careless and stupid. Almost thirteen months ago, when Danny and the other boys in his troop were on their winter survival outing, one of our scientists, a quirky son of a bitch named Larry Bellinger, accidentally contaminated himself while he was working alone one morning in this lab.”
Danny’s hand tightened on Christina’s and she stroked his head, soothing him. To Dombey, she said, “Surely you have safeguards, procedures to follow when and if -”
“Of course,” Dombey said. “You’re trained what to do from the day you start to work here. In the event of accidental contamination, you immediately set off an alarm. Immediately. Then you seal the room you’re working in. If there’s an adjoining isolation chamber, you’re supposed to go into it and lock the door after yourself. A decontamination crew moves in swiftly to clean up whatever mess you’ve made in the lab. And if you’ve infected yourself with something curable, you’ll be treated. If it’s not curable… you’ll be attended to in isolation until you die. That’s one reason our pay scale is so high. Hazardous-duty pay. The risk is part of the job.”
Reference: Koontz, D. R. (Dean R. (n.d.). The eyes of darkness.