Viral Posts Falsely Align Viruses to Election Years

Quick Take

Viral posts on social media claim COVID-19 is no worse than other outbreaks that have occurred in “every election year,” suggesting that the new coronavirus is being “hyped” to hurt President Donald Trump. But most of the dates cited to defend those conclusions about previous outbreaks are misleading or incorrect.

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A viral image of a whiteboard sign claiming to have been “Posted at a Doctors office today” purportedly lists disease outbreaks that occurred in “every election year” since 2004. The image says the new coronavirus is “being hyped as The Black Plague.” One Facebook post that shared the photo includes a comment that the new coronavirus “is hyped to make Trump look bad.”

But the dates listed for the outbreaks of most of the diseases are incorrect; the impact of those diseases was not widely felt in federal election years.

The image, which appears in, shows a handwritten sign that reads, in part, “Every election year has a disease.” It then lists: “SARS-2004 Avian-2008 Swine-2010 MERS-2012 Ebola-2014 Zika-2016 Ebola-2018 Corona-2020”