An episode of the 2003 television show Dead Zone has left people wondering if Hollywood had predicted the coronavirus outbreak years before we even had the notion of the deadly pandemic turning our lives upside down.
In the episode titled “Plague” Johnny Smith, a retired school teacher gets a vision of a group of children becoming extremely ill after they are infected with a mysterious virus. He informs the town sheriff about what he saw and asks him to quarantine the school building as the children start to get sick.
However, what’s interesting about the episode is how it has predicted the chain of events, like we have been witnessing since the start of the year when hundreds started dying in China due to the virus.
The episode shows that the local health inspector while trying to figure out where the virus came from talks about China as the source and has people who have recently travelled as one of the ways virus could have been transmitted. It also talks about how the US-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, popularly known as the CDC, is said to take months to figure out a cure or where it originated from.
The episode also emphasis on the immediate lockdown, something which has been enforced worldwide by countries to stem the spread of the virus.
There is also a discussion about wearing masks, which is somehow deemed a bad idea for political reasons.
In an even more bizarre turn of events, the episode also suspects that the virus originated from an animal, possibly a skunk (in our case it’s a bat), it being airborne and hydroxychloroquine, the anti-malaria drug being touted as a possible cure for the coronavirus, both in the episode and the real world.
Interestingly enough, the virus in the episode also caused high fever and respiratory distress, however, unlike the coronavirus, we have been battling, the incubation period for this virus is just 48 hours.
Crazy isn’t it?
