With all the news about the scary new coronavirus coming out of China, you’d have to be completely cut off from the daily news cycle to miss it. But not everyone stops and reads past the headlines, and oftentimes that can lead to some serious confusion, especially when the virus in question shares part of its name with a very popular alcoholic beverage.
As Google Trends reveals on Twitter, searches related to coronavirus have gone through the roof in the past few weeks. That’s to be expected, but there’s another wrinkle here that is both humorous and a bit troubling. As USA Today points out, a lot of people searching for information about the virus seem to think it has something to do with Corona… the beer.
Twitter replies to the Corona account are mostly tongue-in-cheek jabs, at least we hope:
But when you take a look at Google’s own search analytics, it’s clear that there’s a significant number of people who think coronavirus has been linked to consumption of Corona, the beverage.
Global search interest for “coronavirus symptoms” has spiked +1,050% this week. 😷 Here are the top searched questions in the past 24 hours.#coronavirus #GoogleTrends pic.twitter.com/bPVsL3hCYW
— GoogleTrends (@GoogleTrends) January 21, 2020
Search terms like “beer virus” have spiked recently, as well as “corona beer virus.” A quick glance at the Google Trends tracking for these search terms makes it abundantly clear:
Just to be totally clear about all of this: China’s coronavirus has absolutely nothing to do with Corona, the beer, or any other beer carrying a similar name. The label, while unfortunate for Corona, is simply its scientific name, and it’s a name that has been around since the 1960s.
The coronavirus outbreak is a bit scary, and yeah, it’s a bad situation all around, but don’t let that stop you from enjoying a brewski if that’s your thing.
