People with Coronavirus Love to Travel

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About

People with Coronavirus Love to Travel is a series of memes and jokes about those infected with the coronavirus COVID-19 traveling around the world for vacation, despite the highly contagious nature of the virus.

Origin

On December 8th, 2019, the first symptoms related to the virus began were reported in Wuhan, China, with the first reported cases on December 31st.

Months later, as the virus continued to spread throughout the world, a series of jokes relating to people with the coronavirus traveling for vacation began appearing online. While the origin of the meme is unclear, Redditor ^[1] Skyeisland posted one of the earliest known and available versions on March 3rd, 2020. The two-panel meme, which features a photograph of the countries of the world with the caption "love knows no borders" above a screenshot from the Animaniacs Yakko's World music video, received more than 45,000 points (91% upvoted) and 125 comments in less than one week (shown below).

Spread

Over the next week, memes about the correlation between coronavirus and a desire to travel became more prevalent on social media. For example, on March 5th, Instagram ^[2] meme account published a variation of the Fitness Is My Passion meme, which reads "People 0.00069 seconds after getting infected by coronavirus / Traveling is my passion." The post received more than 88,000 likes in less than one week (shown below, left).

That day, Twitter ^[3] user @DijahSB tweeted a joke about those who are not infected by the virus suddenly deciding to travel as well due to a decline in the price of air travel. Above a photograph of Peter Parker (portrayed by Tom Holland) in the film Spider-Man: Far From Home, they wrote, "me after hearing someone cough on my $8 round trip flight to italy." Within one week, the tweet received more than 397,000 likes and 80,000 retweets (shown below, center).

Instagram^[4] user @tank.sinatra posted a Lisa Simpson's Presentation meme about the phenomenon. The post received more than 70,000 likes in less than one week (shown below, right).

Various Examples

Search Interest

Not available.

External References