Without reposting and further spreading misinformation, it has come to my attention that some people are using a video of crows heading to roost in China as evidence of a coronavirus apocalypse. This is wrong for so, so many reasons.
1) Crows gathering in large numbers in the evening is extremely normal. Here’s an example of such an event recorded by me right here in Seattle. They are getting together before heading to the roost to sleep.
2) While some birds have excellent senses of smell and can use odors to detect food, there is absolutely no evidence that the sense of smells of crows is anywhere near good enough to detect disease in humans. They’re not dogs.
3) And this maybe the most important...the coronavirus is...not actually killing loads of people? Look, I’m not a public health worker & by all means please be safe and practice good hygiene because being sick is the worst and we don’t want this disease to become a huge problem.
But the coronavirus has killed less than 1k globally. The flu has already killed 10k people and infected tens of millions of people according to the CDC. So if even if crows could sniff out disease why on earth would they waste their time on coronavirus?
So yeah, if you see this nonsense shut it down. It’s just perpetuating incorrect and often blatantly racists fears about a disease that is currently no where near as deadly as the flu.
