Two novelists may have predicted the Covid-19 Coronavirus outbreak long before it took place. In 1981, author Dean Koontz wrote a thriller called The Eyes Of Darkness. In the book, he describes a killer virus named ‘Wuhan-400’ after the Chinese city it originated in — the same city where COVID-19 was first reported. While there are numerous differences between the virus that Koontz describes and the one current creating a global epidemic, the similarities that exist are uncanny. One of the big differences between the two is the virus that Koontz described was developed as a weapon and has a death rate of 100%. The Coronavirus only has a death rate of about 2 percent.
Another author, Sylvia Browne, who died seven years ago, wrote in 2008 a book that visualized almost exactly the current Coronavirus. The book was titled “The End Of Days Predictions and Prophecies About The End Of The World” and it described a virus that very much resembled pneumonia and would have an outbreak in the year 2020. The virus spread quickly across the globe and would affect people’s lungs and their ability to breathe. The virus would be impervious to all treatments known to modern medicine. It would baffle doctors. Browne envisioned that the disease would disappear as quickly as it arrived and would only resurface a decade later before disappearing forever.
Browne claimed to be a medium with psychic abilities.
(YWN Israel Desk – Jerusalem)
Join the official YWN WhatsApp status
10 Responses
There is room for skepticism
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/sylvia-browne-coronavirus/
https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-coronavirus-koontz-book/partly-false-claima-1981-book-predicted-the-coronavirus-2019-outbreak-idUSKCN20M19I
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/sylvia-browne-coronavirus/
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/dean-koontz-predicted-coronavirus/
also i am pilgrim by terry hayes
“Browne claimed to be a medium with psychic abilities.“
I’m glad she didn’t claim to be a large
🤣🤣😂🤣🤣🤣😂
I crack myself up
Gemara Brochos 59A. gemara discourages one from using koach hatuma to be mefarsaim or listening to one who uses such powers. That being the case I think this article should be removed or at the very least edited to exclude the second subject
“End of the world” stories are common in western literature (and probably have a basis in Christian theology and culture). They are very unpredictive since they aren’t based on reality. Anyone who takes such literature seriously should probably be assumed to be a fool or an apikores and not allowed to write for frum publications.
This is one of the stupidest articles YWN has ever published, and that’s an impressive achievement. Even by the standards of stupidity this one is stupid.
There are NO significant similarities between the virus in Koontz’s novel and the one we’re dealing with. None whatsoever.
As for the charlatan Browne, she did NOT “visualize almost exactly the current Coronavirus”. All she wrote was that somewhere around 2020, i.e. anywhere from 2015 to 2025, some sort of upper respiratory disease would spread. That happens every few years. She wrote this just after the SARS outbreak, and that undoubtedly gave her the idea of predicting something similar. But her description would equally match any kind of flu, or many other common illnesses. There has probably never been a ten-year period without some such outbreak. But the virus is not “impervious to all treatments known to modern medicine”, and it does not at all “baffle doctors”. On the contrary, it behaves and responds exactly as one would expect it to, and the overwhelming majority — anywhere between 99% and 99.9% — of people who get it recover.
So this article is pure garbage, and whoever wrote it should be ashamed of themselves.
the book NAKED LUNCH best describes this photo above______interesting how such nonsense of authors and their claims, each one of us has claimed this concern without a title or a book,,,,China who has a very ageing population has a greater opportunity to cause this out of proportion diseasement
Neither of these books made “predictions.” They are base on information well- known to epidemiologists and other public health experts. The authors did what lots of novelists do: they flesh out a story, put characters in it and dramatize what experts know about various phenomena, whether it’s war, or murder, or a romance, or a pandemic.
Purim News Story? The fiction story writers were just using well known facts and put it together as many others have known could happen. Nothing new,