The more people are infected, the more people are conditioned by many rumors, myths, and misinformation about the current pandemic of Covid-19 in recent weeks: one of the most curious is a posthumous prophecy in a book by psychic Sylvia Browne.
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Sylvia Browne: the prophecy in her book
In her 2008 book End of Days, Browne predicted that:
In around 2020 a severe pneumonia-like illness will spread throughout the globe, attacking the lungs and the bronchial tubes and resisting all known treatments. Almost more baffling than the illness itself will be the fact that it will suddenly vanish as quickly as it arrived, attack again ten years later, and then disappear completely.
It makes people on social media assuming that Browne had accurately predicted the Covid-19 outbreak. Kim Kardashian also shared such posts, causing the book to become a best-seller once again.
There’s a lot packed into these two sentences. First, Browne predicted “A severe pneumonia-like illness,” but Covid-19 is not “a severe pneumonia-like illness” (though it can in some cases lead to pneumonia). Most of those infected (about 80%) have mild symptoms and recover just fine, and the disease has a mortality rate of between 2 and 4%. Browne claims it “will spread throughout the globe, attacking the lungs and the bronchial tubes,” and Covid-19 has indeed spread throughout the globe, but Browne also says the disease she’s describing “resists all known treatments.” This does not describe Covid-19: in fact, doctors know how to treat the disease—it’s essentially the same for flu or other similar respiratory infections. This Covid-19 is not “resisting” all (or any) known treatments.
She further describes the illness: “Almost more baffling than the illness itself will be the fact that it will suddenly vanish as quickly as it arrived, attack again ten years later, and then disappear completely.” This is false: Covid-19 has not “suddenly vanished as quickly as it arrived,” and even if it eventually does, its emergence pattern would have to be compared with other typical epidemiology data to know whether it’s “baffling.”
Then she wrote in her book, “By 2020, more people than ever wearing surgical masks and rubber gloves in public”, note that “This illness will be particularly baffling in that, after causing a winter of absolute panic, it will seem to vanish completely until ten years later, making both its source and its cure that much more mysterious” was changed to “Almost more baffling than the illness itself will be the fact that it will suddenly vanish as quickly as it arrived, attack again ten years later, and then disappear completely.”
There are also more predictions, mostly wrong, vague, unverifiable, in the distant future, some right, and so not. Browne claims that “my accuracy rate is somewhere between 87 and 90 percent if I’m recalling correctly.” Yet another failed prediction.