Apparently People Think the Corona Virus Is Related to Corona Beer
As if flu season wasn’t already bad enough, the outbreak of Coronavirus, which has sickened 2,000 people in China and 100 in the US, has made it worse. The extent or severity of the outbreak is still unclear, but it’s bad enough that China has essentially placed 36 million residents of Wuhan under lockdown in order to contain the situation.
While much remains unknown about the current Coronavirus, we do know one thing that seems to have eluded many Googlers: it has nothing to do with Mexican-style pale lager.
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According to Google Trends data observed by BoingBoing, there’s been a spike in searches for “corona beer virus” since news of the outbreak first hit public consciousness. Perhaps fittingly given our collective medical ignorance and appetite for imported beer, America seems to be a major epicenter of this belief that Corona beer and the novel Coronavirus of 2019 (aka 2019-nCov) are somehow connected. However, Europe (especially Finland) deserves some credit for also wondering if beer is the cause of what appears to be a form of pneumonia resistant to current vaccines.
Though there’s no connection between the beer and virus beyond their shared use of the Latin word for “crown” (which describes the look of the virus in this case), it’s worth noting note that Corona (the beer) is technically older than the Coronavirus. The famous cerveza was first brewed in 1925, but scientists didn’t detect the first strain in this series of respiratory illness-inducing viruses until the 1960’s.
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The only “Corona beer virus” you need to worry about is what’s more commonly referred to as “a hangover”, and you’ll probably have to put back more than a few of those 4.5% ABV beers to worry about that. And if you did Google that, just know that the NSA operative in charge of tracking your every online move is probably laughing at you right now.
