Tags: Coronavirus »»»» Corona Beer
The Coronavirus is apparently a very serious issue. The World Health Organization just declared a world health emergency over this disease outbreak. Since they did that after only 300 or so deaths indicates that officials see something serious in the pattern of this disease that it is feared it will become a major problem. On the other hand there is a spike in Google Searches for the phrase "corona beer virus" - which just tells us that a lot of people are easily confused. Hey! People! It's not about Corona Beer!
According to
Wikipedia:
Coronaviruses are a group of viruses that cause diseases in mammals and birds.
So the word Coronavirus doesn't even refer to the specific outbreak stemming from Wuhan China, it is a general term for virus's that even include the common cold virus. The
Coronavirus coming from Wuhan is dubbed 2019-nCoV. As of this writing the Wikipedia page says that around 10,000 people are known to have the disease worldwide, the first death occurred on January 9, 2020, and less than 300 people have died of the disease so far. The vast majority of cases are in China, and the only deaths so far are in China.
There is widespread official concern about the virus, and you should be looking to official sources for information rather than reading this article. This article is about a bit of nonsense in that there are a bunch of folks confusing the virus with Corona Beer.
This is the top of Google News right now - and articles like this go on for quite a long ways. There really are people worried that Corona Beer has something to do with the Coronavirus, and they are searching for information.
Fortunately a search for something like "corona beer virus cure" turns up a ton of articles saying that there's a hoax or misunderstanding about Corona Virus and Corona Beer. Therefore anybody who does get worried, and starts searching for information, will find themselves educated, and they might have a good laugh. We hope.
Another source of data is using Google Trends - the tool that shows, well, trends in search terms typed into the Google search engine. It is a useful resource for finding out what people are thinking.
Today is January 30, 2020. Therefore, for almost 2 weeks there's been a growing number of searches in both the USA and worldwide for "Corona Beer Virus".
Sigh.
Really? People! Get with it!
We can't make stuff like this up, can we?
But - breath a sigh of relief. Comparing the number of people using the real search term, "coronavirus", to the fake-news search term, "corona beer virus", and we see the confused people are a tiny fraction of the rest of us.
What this graph shows is the vast majority are using the correct search term. The ones using the incorrect search phrase, with the word "beer", are a vanishingly small number of the total search volume.
This means there is hope for humanity.
