There’s a new ‘C-word’ that has been on everyone’s mind lately - the novel coronavirus, which originated in Wuhan, China, and has now turned into a global pandemic. Europe has been declared the new epicentre for the spreading virus and governments around the world are trying their best to battle it.
People around the world are self-quarantining and practicing social distancing, making things feel quite apocalyptic. India is airlifting its citizens from affected countries and making sure people are tested and quarantined. While the COVID-19 outbreak may have come as a shock to some, there some TV shows, films and books that have previously hinted at this crisis.
When The Simpsons Predicted Coronavirus
“Please don’t tell the supervisor, I have the flu,” says a cartoon character in a clip from an episode of The Simpsons which aired in 1993. Though not all parts fit, the sequence of events are quite unnerving. It shows a factory worker in Japan coughing into a box that’s then couriered to the USA. The box is delivered to Homer Simpson along with what the writers termed as the Osaka Flu.
There are images circulating on social media that show the word coronavirus photoshopped in the background. The Simpson’s episode only partly predicts the flu and the writers called it Osaka Flu in the episode.
Dean Koontz Book The Eyes of Darkness
When people are in self-quarantine, they read. But this book might just run chills down your spine. In his 1981 book The Eyes of Darkness, Dean Koontz wrote of a virus called Wuhan 400. In a page from the novel that’s being shared online, a character named Dombey narrates a story about a Chinese scientist who brought a biological weapon called Wuhan-400 to the United States.
Here’s an excerpt from the book:
“To understand that,” Dombey said, “you have to go back 20 months. It was around then that a Chinese scientist named Li Chen defected to the United States, carrying a diskette record of China’s most important and dangerous new biological weapon in a decade. They call the stuff Wuhan-400 because it was developed at their RDNA labs outside the city of Wuhan, and it was the four-hundredth viable strain of man-made microorganisms created at that research centre.
In the original 1981 edition of the book, the biological weapon was called Gorki-400, which was changed to Wuhan-400 in 1989 when the book was re-released. However, the coronavirus is likely to have originated from bats. That it is a biological weapon conceived in China is a conspiracy theory that has been debunked.
2011 Release Contagion
Even watching the trailer of Contagion that released in 2011 could make you feel uncomfortable. The film is based on a disease that can spread through ‘one touch’ and doesn’t have a cure or vaccine which eerily resembles the current situation with the coronavirus outbreak across the world.
The film has been climbing up on Apple rentals in the past week and shows how one misguided policy decision or thoughtless action from authorities can have a devastating domino effect.
Remember Rapunzel?
We have all grown up watching Disney movies and shows and if you remember anything about Rapunzel, it should the fact that she was in quarantine by the sorceress in the tower. But there’s a might detail here that no one every paid heed to, until now. With the spread of coronavirus, people are talking about how the name of the tower the witch locked Rapunzel in was called - Corona.
Bamboozled? So are we.
Sylvia Browne’s End of Days
Author Sylvia Browne, who claimed to have psychic abilities, predicted a “pneumonia-like illness” to “spread throughout the globe in 2020” in her 2008 book End of Days. An excerpt reads:
“In around 2020, a severe pneumonia-like illness will spread throughout the globe, attacking the lungs and bronchial tubes resisting all known treatments. Almost more baffling than the illness itself will be the fact that it will suddenly vanish as quickly as it arrives, attack again 10 years later and then disappear completely.”
(At The Quint, we are answerable only to our audience. Play an active role in shaping our journalism by becoming a member. Because the truth is worth it.)