Corona-chan

Corona-chan (Japanese: コロナちゃん) is a moe anthropomorphization of the coronavirus which became a popular meme on 4chan, Reddit and other websites during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

In mid-January 2020, 4chan users created the Corona-chan character as a girl with bat wings and green eyes wearing a red cheongsam, an item of traditional Chinese clothing, with thorny spheres for hair buns, symbolizing the virus. In some representations, she holds the flag of China and hands out bat soup. These features reference the popular bat soup and Wuhan lab theories for the origin of the virus. Vice Media reporter Samantha Cole said that "Turning a virus that's killed nearly 8,000 people, especially in China and Japan, into a cute anime girl is insensitive to that reality... but it's also a way people have chosen to cope using gallows humor and a horny anime drawing". On 4chan, a user made a thread titled “All hail, Peng Zhou, creator of Corona-Chan”, linking to an article by Zero Hedge, claiming that the new coronavirus may have been created by the Wuhan Institute of Virology, at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. As a pun, she was also often represented holding or drinking a Corona beer.

The subreddit "r/coronachan", which features illustrations of the character, had 2,000 subscriptions by 2020. There are Corona-chan galleries on the Internet. Lushsux created a wall graffiti showing the coronavirus Corona-chan standing behind a mask-wearing PewDiePie.

Moe anthropomorphism had been applied to diseases online before: during the Ebola virus outbreak of West Africa in 2014, the character of Ebola-chan was already circulating on image boards and online discussion forums in the English-speaking world.