What was claimed
Covid-19 doesn’t really exist.
Our verdict
It does, and there’s plenty of evidence, including the multiple times the virus that causes it has been sequenced and isolated, and the number of deaths and hospitalisations it has caused.
Scrabble picture is wrong to say Covid-19 doesn’t exist
An image on Facebook showing a scrabble board and a letter holder spelling out ‘Covid-19’ has the caption: “When you’re playing scrabble and you cheat by making s*** up”.
The implication here is that Covid-19 is not real. This is false—there is plenty of evidence that Covid-19 exists.
As we have written before, multiple scientists have isolated the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes the disease and determined its entire genetic makeup by sequencing its genome.
Covid-19 PCR tests allow us to see whether a small amount of the virus is present in a sample, indicating that an individual was infected when they took the test. Lateral flow tests detect a specific type of SARS-CoV-2 viral protein in those with Covid-19 infections.
Some have used an 130-year-old theory called Koch’s postulates, and claimed that means the virus does not exist. These rules, created by scientist Robert Koch in 1890 were formulated before viruses were known to exist so don’t disprove the existence of SARS-CoV-2. Others have claimed it’s just a re-branded version of the flu, but that’s not true either, as the two diseases are caused by totally different viruses.
The US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases has also released pictures of the virus taken by extremely powerful electron microscopes.
We also have evidence the disease is real because of how many people have died from it. There have also been over 200,000 deaths in the UK where Covid-19 was mentioned on the death certificate as one of the causes, as of 2 September 2022.
Aside from deaths, we also know that 990,000 patients have been admitted to hospitals in the UK with the disease.
Image courtesy of the NIAID
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as missing context because the implication that Covid-19 is made up is false.