Wuhan coronavirus prompts netizens to study World of Warcraft epidemic

A new deadly coronavirus spreading from the Chinese city of Wuhan has the country gripped in terror. To cope with this sense of impending doom, netizens are rushing to study what happened when a different epidemic outbreak spread across the world… of Warcraft. 

Back in 2005, a coding error led to the Corrupted Blood incident that wreaked havoc in the massive multiplayer game World of Warcraft (WoW). It wound up infecting more than a million characters. Soon after, epidemiologists treated it as a classic case study of human behavior during an epidemic.

With memories of the hundreds of deaths during China’s 2003 outbreak of Sars, another coronavirus, people have been turning to media that matches their mood. The mobile game Plague Inc. recently became the most-downloaded paid app in Apple’s Chinese iOS App Store, and Korean film The Flu was the most searched-for film on Douban.

Now a Weibo hashtag related to the World of Warcraft epidemic has become one of the most-searched terms, reaching nearly 60 million views. And one Weibo influencer spotted a similarity between their origins: The Wuhan coronavirus and Corrupted Blood both started in animals.