Fact check: The COVID-19 pandemic is not a hoax

McKenzie Sadeghi, USA TODAY
·7 min read

The claim: The COVID-19 pandemic is a lie

Nearly two years since the first COVID-19 case was detected, some people are still pushing the conspiracy theory that the pandemic is a hoax, despite 800,000 deaths and 55 million confirmed infections in the U.S. alone.

The false narrative that COVID-19 doesn’t exist took off in May 2020, after the “Plandemic” documentary produced by a widely discredited scientist promoted misinformation surrounding the virus and its origins. Since then, variations of the claim have continued to spread online, recently resurfacing amid the spread of the highly contagious omicron variant.

“If we were in a real pandemic people would be dying in their homes by the thousands, hazmat teams would be removing bodies daily, mass grave sites would be everywhere,” reads a screenshot of a tweet that was shared to Facebook on Dec. 28, 2021, and accumulated more than 600 reactions within a day. “In over two years we have seen nothing like this anywhere in the world. Stop calling this a pandemic, it’s a lie.”

The original Dec. 20, 2021 tweet generated more than 3,000 likes. Claims that the pandemic is “fake” have gained traction among supporters of former President Donald Trump, who have previously falsely claimed that the spread of the virus is a coordinated effort against the former president.

But the COVID-19 pandemic is not a "lie" or a hoax, as the post claims. Data shows COVID-19 has infected and killed millions of people across the world, and scientists have identified and isolated the novel coronavirus.

Special access for subscribers! Click here to sign up for our fact-check text chat

The Twitter and Facebook users who shared the post did not return requests for comment.

COVID-19 pandemic is real

The World Health Organization declared the COVID-19 outbreak a global pandemic in March 2020, and data shows there have been more than 5 million confirmed deaths from the virus and 290 million positive cases worldwide.

And those tallies no doubt understate the pandemic's toll. Testing numbers don't include the vast numbers of people now relying on at-home tests. And USA TODAY reported in December that poor record-keeping has likely spurred a significant undercount of COVID-19 deaths, since nearly 1 million more people died in 2020 and 2021 than in normal years, but only 800,000 of those were officially attributed to the virus.

The first case of COVID-19 was reported in December 2019 in Wuhan, China, caused by a novel coronavirus identified by scientists as SARS-CoV-2. Researchers have isolated SARS-CoV-2 and sequenced the full genome. The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases has also released detailed images of SARS-CoV-2 particles.

Fact check: Omicron coronavirus variant is not the common cold

The user claims COVID-19 can’t be real because people aren’t dying in their homes by the thousands and there are no mass gravesites.

But photos and news reports have documented otherwise ever since the early stages of the pandemic.

In March 2020, military trucks transported bodies to cremation sites in Bergamo, Italy, because the city’s local cemeteries were overwhelmed with the number of COVID-19 fatalities. Satellite images were released in 2020 of authorities in Iran building mass burial sites in response to the growing death toll at the time. Bodies of COVID-19 victims were buried in several other countries that ran out of morgue space or in instances where bodies remained unidentified.

Officials wearing hazmat suits and other protective gear have also been photographed transferring bodies of deceased COVID-19 patients to refrigerated trucks and funeral homes in New York City, Florida and New Jersey.

According to the provisional death count from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 65,444 people have died in their homes from COVID-19 as of Dec. 29, 2021. In February 2021, the Associated Press reported that an increasing number of COVID-19 patients across the country chose to die at home so they wouldn’t have to say goodbye to loved ones via video calls.

Several independent fact-check organizations have previously debunked the claim that nobody has been discovered dead in their home from COVID-19, as well as claims that the pandemic is a hoax.

Since the first case of COVID-19 emerged, the WHO has identified different variants of concern including beta, gamma, delta and most recently, omicron. Health officials say the pandemic will fade when enough people become immune to COVID-19 either through vaccination or prior infection.

Fact check: COVID-19, election misinformation dominated social media in 2021

Our rating: False

Based on our research, we rate FALSE the claim that the COVID-19 pandemic is a lie. The virus has killed more than 5 million people around the world, and more than 290 million positive cases have been recorded. Footage and news reports have documented overwhelmed hospitals and cemeteries, including from more than 60,000 people who died from the virus in their homes.

Our fact-check sources:

Thank you for supporting our journalism. You can subscribe to our print edition, ad-free app, or electronic newspaper replica here.

Our fact-check work is supported in part by a grant from Facebook.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Fact check: Viral post falsely claims the COVID-19 pandemic isn’t real

  • Up next
  • Up next
  • Up next
  • Up next
  • Up next
  • Up next
  • Up next