By JOSE PAOLO S. DELA CRUZ
Tongues are wagging across the web as Netflix viewers noticed a strange case of art imitating – or should we say, predicting – life in a scene from the 2018 Korean Drama, My Secret Terrius.
(The scene from My Secret Terrius, Episode 10)
A scene from Episode 10 clearly depicts a doctor saying: “The coronavirus attacks the respiratory system. What’s more serious is that the coronavirus has an incubation period of two to 14 days.”
More from Episode 10, there’s also no cure or vaccine available for the virus, which the doctor also referred to as a “mutated coronavirus.” Eerily, a scene in the series also shows children being instructed to wash their hands as a means of preventing the disease from spreading
Compared to SARS and other deadly respiratory diseases, the “coronavirus” in My Secret Terrius was manipulated to become a bio-weapon that attacks the lungs directly within just five minutes of being exposed. It also has a mortality rate of 90 percent — far more fatal than its presumed real-life counterpart, COVID-19, whose mortality rate is tagged by the World Health Organization at around three to four percent.
While the the term coronavirus does ring an alarming bell these days, it isn’t quite as exclusive to COVID-19 as one would think. In fact, medical author Dr. Melissa Conrad Stoppler defines coronavirus as “a type of common virus that infects humans, typically leading to an upper respiratory infection. Seven different types of human coronaviruses have been identified. Most people will be infected with at least one type of coronavirus in their lifetime.”
Dr. Stoppler adds that “the MERS-CoV (the beta coronavirus that causes Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, or MERS), SARS-CoV (the beta coronavirus that causes Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, or SARS), and the new 2019 novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV, now known as COVID-19) outbreak that began in Wuhan, China,” all fall under this category.
Available for streaming at Netflix, My Secret Terrius is a 2018 South Korean TV series starring So Ji-sub, Jung In-sun, Son Ho-jun and Im Se-mi. It follows the story of a secret service agent who detaches himself from the world after a failed operation.
