Did The K-drama “My Secret Terrius” Predicted The 2020 COVID-19 Outbreak? Deets inside

People across the world are confined to their homes due to the coronavirus outbreak. With people staying in their homes there has been an increase in the subscriptions of streaming services. And Netflix viewers have come across a coincidence linking the plot in a South Korean drama with the current pandemic affecting the world.

The Korean series My Secret Terrius has left a large number of viewers surprised by how it predicted two years back that a coronavirus outbreak would take place. The show released in 2018 tells the story of a secret agent who isolates himself from the world after an unsuccessful operation and tries to unravel the mystery behind a neighbor’s death.

The show may come across as a captivating murder-mystery, but in the tenth episode of the first season, viewers have recognized that at 53 mins in, the plot comes to a dialogue over the coronavirus, though there is no reference to the present COVD-19 that is causing the pandemic.

The translation of the dialogues is as follows:

Doctor: “We must do more research, but it looks like a mutant coronavirus.”

Agent: “Corona? Then MERS?”

Doctor: “MERS, SARS, the common flu. They all fall in the same gene family with the same gene information. The coronavirus attacks the respiratory system. During the 2015 MERS epidemic, the mortality rate was over 20 percent.”

Agent: “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.

Most people who saw this understandably put up the part online, and social media began trending My Secret Terrius, and users across the sphere began probing for the episode on Netflix. But did the show actually predict the coronavirus? A fact check will make things clear.

  • The novel coronavirus or SARS-CoV-2 is not man-made. (People have been accusing China, but we all know this, not guilty until proven)
  • The novel coronavirus is a new strain in the coronavirus family.
  • The estimated mortality of coronavirus disease is about 3-4%.
  • The coronavirus has an incubation period of 2-14 days.

So, as we can see from the facts above, the coronavirus being talked about in the show is quite different from the current pandemic. The group of viruses known as the coronavirus has been around since the 1960s and it’s not uncommon for a TV show to use the name.