Google Trends has revealed a spike in searches for “Coronavirus beer”, "Corona virus beer" and “ Corona beer virus ” in the last few days.
The searches are primarily coming from Australia, India, Canada and the US and suggest people are confusing Corona beer with the coronavirus.
From January 18 to January 26, searches for “corona beer virus” jumped 2300% globally, according to Google Trends.
Searches for “beer virus” jumped 744% in the same period, and searches for “beer coronavirus” jumped 3233%.
However, the deadly virus has nothing to do with Mexican alcoholic beverages and is suspected to have originated from a seafood market in Wuhan, China.
Coronaviruses are named for the spikes that protrude from their membranes, which resemble the sun’s corona. They can infect both animals and people, and can cause illnesses of the respiratory tract, ranging from the common cold to dangerous conditions like Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, or SARS.
Daily Dot reports the Corona beer virus confusion is leading people to create dark memes on the topic, such as this tweet below:
Boing Boing adds that it hopes Corona beer won't suffer the same fate as Ayds, an appetite-suppressant candy from the 1930s-1980s.
When public awareness about AIDS grew in the mid-80s, sales of Ayds declined. Eventually Ayds went out of business.
From Wikipedia: "By the mid-1980s, public awareness of the disease AIDS caused problems for the brand due to the phonetic similarity of names and the fact that the disease caused immense weight loss in patients. While initially sales were not affected, by 1988 the chair of Dep Corporation announced that the company was seeking a new name because sales had dropped as much as 50% due to publicity about the disease. While the product's name was changed to Diet Ayds (Aydslim in Britain), it was eventually withdrawn from the market."
Corona poised to steal Budweiser's crown
Constellation Brands, which produces Corona, said it's not concerned by the spike in searches.
“We believe, by and large, that consumers understand there’s no linkage between the virus and our business,” spokesperson Maggie Bowman told Business Insider.
Corona's sales are booming globally. Motley Fool reports: "Last quarter, Constellation reported depletions for Corona jumped 7% from the year-ago period driven higher by gains made by Corona Extra and Corona Refresca, a flavored malt beverage the alcohol distributor introduced to blunt some of the impact of hard seltzers. It's since turned into a top-five market share gainer for the high-end beer segment in the US even though it launched only in the first fiscal quarter of 2020.
"IRI says Corona Extra saw a 2.4% rise in sales in 2019, enough to give it $1.8 billion in revenue, and putting it in a virtual tie with Budweiser. But it's Constellation's other Mexican import, Modelo Especial, that's the real sleeper. It had 18.8% growth last year, causing sales to surge to $2.1 billion and making it the fourth biggest beer, ahead of even Miller Lite."
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