"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," reads the first part of the passage, posted to Twitter by celebrities including Kim Kardashian .
Now, it seems many people are giving credence to the existence of "psychics," or at least, one psychicBrowne, whose 2008 book, End of Days, has shot up toward the top of the best-sellers in the "Christian books and bibles" category on Amazon , likely because of recent attention.
psychic sylvia brown wrote a book in 2008 called the end of times that appears to predict the coronavirus. heres hoping the part about the virus spontaneously disappearing also pans out. #coronaviruspandemic pic.twitter.com/a7KeQGgwvh Matthew Galea (@mattygalea_)
Browne, who passed in 2013, wasn't infallible when it came to predictionsin fact, very far from it. In a 2004 episode of the Montel Williams Show, where she appeared as a regular contributor to answer questions from audience members (who were often dealing with emotional trauma), she told the mother of Amanda Berry that her daughter had passed; Berry was kidnapped by Ariel Castro and later found alive. Browne remained quiet in the aftermath, though Williams eventually apologized .
Among predictions in dozens of her other books and on her website, she also predicted that a cure for the common cold would already exist, that aliens would have revealed themselves, in addition to providing false information on several missing individuals. ( Here's a montage of Browne's other televised predictions on Montel which ultimately proved to be incorrect or otherwise entirely off-base).
Browne was not a psychic; she was a cold-reader, which means she guessed a lot. She'd use a person's physical appearance to make guesses and give the impression of being all-knowing. Instead of providing psychic insight, however, she made mistakes (and plenty of them), thrived in generalities, and profited off the vulnerable and those people coping with loss. (Her passage which reads that a possible "pneumonia-like" disease would vanish quickly is also obviously quite flawed, if this is, in fact, intended to describe the coronavirus.)
The point of this is to say: If you make enough guesses, even those who are so often wrong might eventually get something a little rightbut not because they're psychic.
Who knows, maybe Browne would've predicted that, too.