Cause Of Death: COVID

About

Cause Of Death: COVID-19, also known as Dies From Coronavirus, refers to a series of image macros using the catchphrases as phrasal templates where someone is killed by any means but their death is humorously attributed to COVID. The memes are a reference to a 2020 news article in which an Orlando motorcycle crash fatality was labeled as a death by coronavirus. This led to many other memes being made in which obvious causes of death would also be labeled as caused by COVID. While sometimes part of a larger counter-culture and skepticism over the COVID-19 pandemic death toll numbers, it is also used merely for humor.

Origin

In the early days of the 2020 coronavirus pandemic, the idea was floated by a senator from Minnesota, named Scott Jensen, that because of the wording involved in the structure of the CARES act, it could be potentially more beneficial for hospitals and health agencies to list the cause of death for many patients to be from COVID-19, as they could receive considerably more money if a patient dies from coronavirus than if they died from something else. On April 20th, 2020, Jensen posted a video to his Facebook and Twitter^[2] about how the process works (shown below).

What have I been talking about…

Conspiracy Theories…not.
COVID-19 facts…yes.

What do you think? #mnleg pic.twitter.com/IBTBTdU9Lr

— Scott Jensen (@drscottjensen) April 20, 2020

On July 16th, 2020, it was then revealed that in Orlando's recent death figures for COVID-19 related deaths, which were being strictly monitored as part of a phased re-opening plan for Disney World to be allowed to open up again, showed that someone who had died as part of a motorcycle accident was allegedly counted as a COVID-19 death. The news report on this incident included audio from the health official, who claimed that it is a possibility that COVID-19 caused the accident, so it might not be taken off the death count. The video of the news report was uploaded to YouTube^[1] by the account KonaSilat on July 17th, 2020, where it gained over 4,000 views in one year (shown below).

Spread

In the following months, the combined story of how the senator previously said that it would be incentivized for deaths to be marked as COVID-19 with the news report and then the Orlando motorcycle crash attributed to COVID, memes began to appear online about how the coronavirus is the cause of death for literally anything that obviously has a different cause of death. For example, one of the first of these memes was posted to the website imgflip^[3] in October 2020, making a joke from Star Trek where someone can be turned into a cube and crushed (shown below).

On the subreddit /r/memes^[4], an American Chopper Argument meme was posted on January 31st, 2021, by the Redditor Fine_Molasses_1354, detailing an argument in which the cause of death for patients should be listed as COVID-19 (shown below).

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References