The coronavirus is scary. Every time I check the number of people who have either been confirmed to have it or who have did because of it, that number has risen. The facts aren’t good as they are, but what really doesn’t help people feel any better is the spreading of misinformation and straight up conspiracies.
The big one that’s been going around Australian Facebook looks like this.
There are a lot of red flags that mark this as bullshit, but the big ones that stood out to me were the fact that they’ve spelled ‘coronavirus’ wrong, and the second is that the Bureau of Diseasology Parramatta is just not a thing. It doesn’t exist. Even NSW Health had to point that out, but to be sure.
It also really seems as if they’ve pulled the list of potentially contaminated products out of thin air. Yakult is Japanese, Mi Goreng is Indonesian, and Nongshim Onion Rings are Korean, all of which are countries that are not China.
I wish this was the only conspiracy doing the rounds, but because humans are terrible, it’s not.
Want to catch up on the biggest conspiracies of 2019? The GOAT Team has you covered…
A video of a woman eating a bat with a caption that suggests coronavirus came from bats in the first place has been a big one. Nope, the virus has been traced to a seafood market and has nothing to do with bats.
Anti-vaxxers seem to be particularly fond of the theory that Bill Gates created the coronavirus to push vaccines, which is just… so incorrect.
Images of this apartment building are being passed off as the first hospital built entirely to treat coronavirus patients.
And a video of people being treated in the quarantine zone has fireworks going off in the background, but people are claiming it’s gunshots to stop people escaping.
Of course there are as many more conspiracy theories popping up as there are people willing to spout crap out on to the internet. As coronavirus spreads, we don’t need – pardon the term – fake news freaking us out even more.
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