False: COVID-19 is not a real pandemic. It is a conspiracy.

COVID-19 is an acute infectious respiratory disease. It is real, and not a conspiracy.In late December 2019, the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission reported a cluster of pneumonia cases to the World Health Organization (WHO). Eventually, a coronavirus called SARS-CoV-2 was identified, and the disease the virus causes was called COVID-19. In March 2020, WHO declared that COVID-19 was a pandemic, saying that there were “more than 118,000 cases in 114 countries, and 4,291 people have lost their lives”. As of December 2020, the situation is much worse, with over 1.5 million people recorded having lost their lives worldwide. Broadly speaking, a “conspiracy” is a secret plan to do harm. Secret plans have of course existed throughout history, however, it is not possible that COVID-19 was orchestrated by a group of people. There is no evidence that COVID-19 is not real, and it is unclear who would benefit from fabricating the pandemic. Writing for Forbes, Dr. Mark Kortepeter, an infectious diseases expert, says that: "There are a lot of reasons to suggest that COVID-19 is exactly what it appears to be—an infectious coronavirus that spilled over from bats into a population that has already experienced a previous spillover event from a related virus." The COVID-19 pandemic has given rise to a lot of potentially dangerous misinformation. For reliable advice on COVID-19, including symptoms, prevention, and available treatment, please refer to the World Health Organization or your national healthcare authority.