The ‘we are the virus’ meme is a whimsical take on coronavirus misinformation

Maybe you've seen whimsical posts about animals like elephants and dolphins returning to areas that humans have abandoned during the coronavirus pandemic. Well, we are sorry to say that dolphins are not actually swimming in the Venice canals. In fact, the vast majority of the reports are not true. But these bad posts did give us one good gift: a meme.

A more annoying feature of the false tweets was the "we are the virus" framing: In addition to being lies, they basically insinuated that Earth is better off even though thousands of people are getting sick. So people started to make fun of them, starting with this tweet about Lime scooters:

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Now memes are popping up about everything from the Snapchat hot dog to Lisa Frank characters "returning to their natural habitats" because humans aren't around to muck it up. There are also a few tweets joking that average landmarks like the Ohio River are looking positively Venetian without people around.

It's all really funny, but in case you don't have a sense of humor ruined by years of staring at the internet, remember that none of it is true.

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One piece of environmental news is actually true, though: carbon emissions are down for real! According to National Geographic, though, they won't stay down unless more countries make clean energy a priority. Maybe the attention-seeking posters of the world can focus on that instead of fake dolphins.