Meme Assignment

My meme is related to the current crisis of the coronavirus. My meme uses a Spongebob image that uses the message of sarcasm and irony to describe the view of certain people about the sickness. Coronavirus started in Wuhan, China, and it started spreading rapidly because of how contagious it was. At first, coronavirus wasn’t considered that serious. I had seen various arguments over social media that the coronavirus is just another “flu” and that the actual flu is more dangerous than coronavirus. I had read an article in late January where it stated that coronavirus couldn’t even be compared to the flu. The article stated that the flu kills 650,000 people per year worldwide, according to the World Health Organization, and that the coronavirus only had 4,583 cases and 106 deaths worldwide at the time. But now it is the beginning of March, and coronavirus is way more dangerous then it might have seemed. The death toll for coronavirus is over 3,000 worldwide and there have been two deaths in the U.S. and several states have declared the virus as a public health emergency. The death rate for the coronavirus in Wuhan China is estimated to be 2%, which is higher than the average of people that die from the seasonal flu, which is .1%. Coronavirus is becoming a massive crisis and it’s starting to affect events. The Olympics are scheduled to be in Tokyo this summer but there is a possibility that it will be cancelled due to the outbreak of the virus. Coronavirus is proving itself to be very dangerous and I wanted my meme to use sarcasm in order to target the audience that believes that coronavirus isn’t a big deal. I think sarcasm appeals to emotion and is used through pathos because it’s a way of showing how the author believes that the audience is contempt.