Did This Novel Predict the COVID-19 Pandemic?

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: And I hate to say but many people have called you a Cassandra for all sorts things you have written just as they become massive in the real world. How did you do it? What led to this novel?

LAWRENCE WRIGHT, AUTHOR, “THE END OF OCTOBER”: Well, what led to it, a decade ago, the filmmaker, Ridley Scott, asked me to write a screenplay. He had read the Cormac McCarthy novel, “The Road,” this post-apocalyptic story of a father and son wandering through the ruins of civilization. And his question was, what happened? You know, what force or event was so powerful that it brought civilization down? And I had done some stories about medical things out of the Center for Disease Control when I was a young reporter. And I just thought, a pandemic would be the most logical cause for a civilization to really crack. You know, something like the 1918 flu. Something we have already experienced in our history but it would kill between 50 million and 100 million people at that time. What would happen now if it came in this world where people are so densely packed together and transportation is instant? How would we handle it? Would we do any better than our ancestors? So, that was a question I had on my mind.

AMANPOUR: So, look. To be fair, I mean, you are a journalist and you had been reporting on this stuff and looking your nose to the ground on all the, you know, threats around. We know that the Obama administration knew about the possibility of such a thing because they had gone through Ebola and we know that there were pandemic playbooks all over the Western world, in the United States, here, that were not used and not taken off the shelf. So, we know that. So, when they all say, who knew, who could have been, you know, prepared for this? No one. We know that that’s not the case. But did you know when you published and were writing that this might happen now?

WRIGHT: No. Not now. I didn’t know when it would happen. But after talking to all of these experts, I took their caution. They all knew it was going to happen. They just didn’t know when. The fact that it happened to coincide with the publication of my novel is a total coincidence. But the fact that it parallel so many of the events we are living through is not. It’s exactly what the experts told me would happen.