One thing that anyone should focus on when reading ‘predictive’ scenarios that have been seen on The Simpsons has to do with what Christian Bone of We Got This Covered has alluded to, there are similarities and yes, there are moments when it would appear that the show has predicted what was to come. However, in the case of the coronavirus many are likely taking the episode featured above as a harbinger of what was going to happen even if people thought it was just a joke on an animated series. Now that people are deciding to worry incessantly about the current virus and its spread without focusing on the fact that people have survived it, shows such as the Simpsons are becoming all the rage when talking about how it was predicted a while back through the use of comedy. If that’s the gauge we’re using when determining just how long people have known about such diseases then there’s a whole laundry list of things that might have been prevented or at least planned for in the past that have occurred before and yet haven’t been given the proper attention or concern. In this case however the coronavirus, serious as it might be when talking about the rate at which it spreads, was not so much predicted as joked at considering how some people might feel about shipped items and where they come from. After all, it’s not the first time a virus has been transmitted across one boundary or another.
If anyone wants to think about it at this time there are quite a few predictions that have come and gone and been given some importance due to how accurate they’ve been. When it comes to the Simpsons a few have been close to being on the mark, while others are based on a matter of perspective and can be used in more than one way depending on the point of view of those making such observations. All in all it’s a cartoon, an animated feature, and one that has been intriguing people in the last several years since some of its guesses actually paid off. As far as the coronavirus, predicting how bad it would get isn’t too hard, but predicting the reaction of those that would have to live with it obviously wasn’t anything that people were ready for. The magic of prediction is that it tends to come from somewhere that’s based on at least some fact and is therefore able to be projected onto a populace in one form or another. After all, Donald Trump ran for president once before, so there’s definitely a basis that the Simpsons pulled from to make such a ‘prediction’. The point is that they didn’t so much predict anything as they did take from something that already existed when performing their guesswork. Anything other than that is a lot of conjecture that has little to no real basis in hard, provable fact when it comes to the Simpsons being on point about anything. Tom Murray and Lindsay Dodgson of Business Insider have more to say on this.
In a way this is just one more method to use to scare the populace even if its more amusing than most and bound to be taken with a big grain of salt by a lot of people for the reason given above. There’s been enough fear-mongering in the media at this point to make sure that the effects of the disease are going to be matched by the methods used to contain it. After all one might not have noticed but the act of affecting a quarantine on entire cities has already been set into place, and gatherings of 25 or more people isn’t something that we’ve seen predicted in the past. A lot of people would say that prediction isn’t an exact science, while some people might say it’s not a science at all, but really, predictions are something that are used to amuse a lot of people and give them something fun to look and to think about. In reality, a prediction is a guess based on current or past trends that have been seen to come around, and it’s a best guess at that.
There’s likely to come a day when a lot of us will look back on these days and realize that there were plenty of reasons to think seriously about this disease, as a good part of the population is susceptible to it. But perhaps we’ll also laugh at the reaction to it that was taken. The disease is after all a serious thing, to be taken with a concern for those that are most at risk, but thus far the lines of thought that have emerged in response to it have been anywhere from silly and kind of ridiculous to alarming and more than a little nonsensical.
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