Until very recently, “Corona” was largely associated with a well-known brand of malted beverage. Latin scholars and other experts, with a tear of condescension in their eyes and a touch of pedantry in their tone, would probably have given you a list of learned terms stemming from these now thrice-cursed three syllables. A lab assistant on methamphetamine wrote in his spiral-bound notepad that the Covid-19 virus resembled a “corona”, and suddenly it was the beer Corona that was going viral. What’s the connection? There isn’t one. As with global warming, here again we must point to a clear rise in idiocy. Without in any way denigrating beer lovers, everyone knows the stereotype of the hick with his 12-pack, whether of Corona or not, just like the Frenchman wearing a beret and striped sweater, with a camembert-stuffed baguette and bottle of red under his arm, or the Englishman in a bowler hat, a cup of tea in one hand while the other stirs it with a silver spoon, sitting on the sands of Stone Bay as a giant tsunami approaches, the American in Ray-Bans and Stetson throwing dollars around, the diminutive Japanese, polite and disciplined, the Chinese grand master of martial arts and eater of insects, snakes, bats, cats and dogs …
The list of cliches could be long (and we’ll refrain from listing the mental images we conjure up of Africans, Arabs, and vice versa); that doesn’t stop them being used instinctively to catalogue the other, because firstly it demands no intellectual effort, and secondly it soothes our uneasy, fragile egos and gives them a sense of security to know that the rather primitive other over there is an idiot. The great levelling of the Internet has been to offer that hick almost instant access to adulterated and contaminated information while conferring on him an aura of manifest prestige. An online search is a true scientific act in quest of knowledge; wondering whether Corona beer is potentially linked to the eponymous virus is to consciously call upon Cartesian doubt.
https://www.fool.com/investing/2020/02/05/drinkers-are-confusing-corona-beer-with-the-corona.aspx
