Did K-Drama 'My Secret Terrius' predict COVID-19 pandemic?
It's a series of did it or didn't it as netizens are puzzled to know whether or not K-drama series “My Secret Terrius” have predicted the coronavirus pandemic.
In the circulating video, a conversation between a doctor and a woman is seen talking about a “mutant coronavirus.”
The scene goes:
Doctor: “We must do more research, 'cause it looks like a mutant coronavirus.”
Woman: “Corona? Then MERS (Middle East Respiratory Syndrome)?”
Doctor: “MERS, SARS, the common flu… they all fall in the same family with the same gene information. Coronavirus attacks the respiratory system. But during the 2015 MERS epidemic, the mortality rate was less than 20 percent.”
Woman: “But, that's not serious enough to be used as a weapon. Am I wrong?”
Doctor: “As I said, this is a mutant virus. Someone tweaked it to increase the mortality rate to almost 90 percent. What's more serious is, that the coronavirus has an incubation of two to fourteen days. The virus was manipulated to attack the lungs directly within five minutes of being exposed.”
Netizens were quick to share the video on their social media accounts noting how the 2018 series have already predicted the current crisis.
“My Secret Terrius” is a 2018 South Korean television series that follows the story of a woman named Go Ae Rin who loses her husband and then discovers he was part of a huge conspiracy.
It was aired back in 2018 at MBC which can now be viewed on Netflix.
But is it all real?
Unlike the show's prediction, it has been claimed by virologist Robert Garry PhD of the Tulane University School of Medicine that the virus is not scientifically manipulated.
He said, “One thing I can tell you is that this is not a bioweapon. Nobody made this virus in a laboratory and this is a product of nature.
“What we believe is that the virus, probably a long time ago, originated from a bat species because there are coronaviruses of bats that are very similar to this new coronavirus. But, there are other parts of the virus that look more like other animal coronaviruses.
“So what we believe is that this is a recombinant.”
Furthermore, it was announced by the World Health Organization that the mortality rate for the new coronavirus appears to be lower than that of the circulating video.
Dated last March 6, it was claimed by WHO that “the crude mortality ratio (the number of reported deaths divided by the reported cases) is between 3-4%”
In an interview for Channel 4 news, Dr. Bruce Aylward, Assistant Director-General of the World Health Organization, explained how the numbers came to be.
He said, “The number that you heard is the number you take from the beginning of the outbreak, including Wuhan and the areas worst hit, right through to today and all of China.
"You know this is a serious disease. Whether its 1%, 2%, 3% mortality rate --- this is a dangerous disease.
"What you should be looking at is how many people are going to get severely ill and are we going to have to put in specialized centers to help them get through this? What do we do to get them treated faster? We should be looking at those numbers because that's how you're gonna manage and control that number.”
As of writing, there are more than 700,000 confirmed cases and 30,000 deaths due to the pandemic.
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