Myths You're Hearing Right Now, Debunked

There are a lot of dumb people out there easily misled by all the evil people who live to trick folks into thinking COVID-19 can be cured by subscribing to their Patreon. These willful liars and innocent but still stupid spreaders of unverified rumors on social media have muddied the coronavirus discussion. This is all to say that some people believe some wild shit about the virus that has no basis in reality. So we've decided to do the legwork of parsing fact from fiction for you. Now it's up to you to stop telling your Facebook friends that ...

COVID-19 Came From A Chinese Lab

Please stop saying this. Your "evidence" that's nothing more than the word of a guy in a bodybuilding forum claiming to have received insider info from his cousin lacks merit. No one is 100% certain how it started, but all evidence points to bats, maybe, possibly bats kept in cages in Chinese wet markets. Wet markets are basically American farmer's markets, but with less $10 mangos and more options our boring asses consider "exotic" and they'd consider "lunch." Wet markets are usually places to pick up some fresh veggies and maybe some butchered meats. The sale of live animals isn't standard, but some do. Maybe some bats in cages shit all over each other, or on other animals even, which then made contact with a human. The wet market part is just a theory, but a leading one. The bat part is the most likely reality.

Anything other than that simple explanation, or anything that seems like a Bond villain's evil plot, is a baseless attack coming from people who have ulterior motives - maybe racist ones, sometimes political ones, usually both. People who study viruses for a living seem to agree that the virus's structure is too complex to have been made by humans in a lab. Until proven otherwise, believing it's a human-made bioweapon gives scientists way too much credit. Scientists that good only exist in action movies, and they usually end up getting shot by the villain when the poor bespectacled researcher can't figure out how to make the virus explode.

All this open the possibility that it was naturally-occurring and somehow made it out of a lab where it was being studied. But, again, that's a claim with nothing even remotely close to concrete evidence to support it.

It Did Not Come From A Bowl Of Bat Soup

There was a rumor going around that the reason we've all eaten our weight in home-baked sourdough of late is because a woman in China ate an infected bowl of bat soup. It makes sense that this absurd lie was perpetrated by the Russian propaganda outlet RT, the shitty journalistic tire fire that is the Daily Mail, and racist twitter dipshits like far-right idiot Paul Joseph Watson. They all thought they were sharing secret footage the Chinese government doesn't want you to see when it was actually a travel blogger eating a regional dish in the Pacific island nation of Palau back in 2016.

You know this was started by the racist lunatic far-right because the theory is so dumb, so poorly constructed, that it can't withstand simple logic, like how cooking this supposed bat would have killed the virus before the soup ever made it to a bowl. There's also the fact that the virus can't be transmitted by ingesting food. It spreads through droplets released through the nose and mouth. If you did swallow it, your stomach acids would kill it, and you'll eventually poop out its corpse. Why would you reject an idea so metal? So, you should be fine if you eat a contaminated burrito. Just don't snort it.

Of course, this means the hot summer sun will kill off the virus, right? Well ...

Warm Weather Will Not Kill It

Research has found that for every 1.8-degree Fahrenheit rise in temperature, there's a 2-percent drop in transmission rate. Viruses don't do well in the heat and thrive in the winter. That's why warm, densely populated cities like Miami and Houston haven't been hit as hard as New York. That doesn't mean heat is killing it off as we approach summer, just slowing it down a little. Unless the earth is overtaken by the fires of Hell this summer, the virus will probably still be around, and we'd have much larger problems to deal with, namely the demons and eternal punishment for our sins.

Don't listen to anyone saying the virus will be killed by summer heat like Trump keeps saying. He is, of course, an astonishingly stupid human who only knows what he's talking about when the subjects are what he's hiding under his butt (the remote) and which quadrant of his giant head the porn star should sit.

5G Towers Caused It

Jesus Christ, are you people serious? If invisible signals in the air caused it, wouldn't pretty much everyone have gotten it at once? Viruses have been around longer than cell towers. The Black Plague was not caused by WiFi signals. No one got SARS because someone decided to install DirectTV. The 5G towers do not, in any way, cause or contribute to the spread of or make you more susceptible to COVID-19.

Don't assume its advanced cellular towers warping our bodies when bats shitting all over each other is an option. It's such a safe option that it's probably wise to start using that metric to explain every conspiracy. Kennedy was killed by batshit, for example.

Luis can be found on Twitter and Facebook. Catch him on the "In Broad Daylight" podcast with Cracked alums Adam Tod Brown and Ian Fortey! Check out his regular contributions to Macaulay Culkin's BunnyEars.com and his "Meditation Minute" segments on the Bunny Ears podcast. Listen to the first episode on Youtube!

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