In early March, amid fears of the Covid-19 pandemic, users on social media shared a snapshot from a page of the book End of Days: Predictions and Prophecies about the End of the World. prophecy about the end of the world) by American author Sylvia Browne.

Browne passed away in 2013. She gained fame by presenting herself as a predictor of the future. According to her, she managed to communicate with the spirits. Among other things, Sylvia Browne has been criticized for providing false information to parents whose children are missing.

Browne vaguely wrote in her 2008 book that in 2020 a respiratory illness will spread across the globe. According to the Google Books version, the book states:

"By 2020, a serious disease like pneumonia will spread around the globe, attacking the lungs and bronchial tubes and will resist any treatment. More worrying is the fact that the disease will disappear just as suddenly as it did, spread 10 years later and then disappear completely. "

The term "forecast" is subjective. What makes this paragraph unreliable is the fact that Browne wrote the book shortly after the outbreak of SARS (Acute Respiratory Syndrome).

Moreover, specialists do not expect Covid-19 to disappear, rather it will return to a common illness, such as seasonal influenza, for example.

Although the description of the disease in "End of Days" is similar to Covid-19, the other elements are incorrect and more than "prediction" is merely a lucky assumption.

It is not the first time that book excerpts are considered "predictions" of coronavirus promoting conspiracy theories.