What is Cause Of Death: COVID?

It's a 2020 image macro and phrasal template, also called Dies From Coronavirus, where a plainly non-medical fatality gets labeled a COVID-19 death for comedic effect.

Where did Cause Of Death: COVID come from?

It grew out of a July 16, 2020 Fox35 Orlando report in which a motorcycle crash death was reportedly tallied as a COVID-19 fatality, paired with earlier claims by Minnesota senator Scott Jensen about CARES Act death-coding incentives.

What does Cause Of Death: COVID mean?

The joke is that any death, no matter how obvious the real cause, can be filed as coronavirus, mocking what posters viewed as inflated or sloppy COVID-19 death counts.

How do you use Cause Of Death: COVID?

A common convention is to take a still of a clearly fatal event, a sword strike, a motorcycle crash, a Star Trek compactor, and add a caption or chyron attributing the death to COVID-19.

Is Cause Of Death: COVID still popular?

The format peaked during the pandemic years, with notable 2020 and 2021 posts on imgflip and r/memes, and it is treated now as a pandemic-era classic rather than an actively trending template.

Cause Of Death: COVID

2020image macro / catchphraseclassic

Published October 15, 2026

Cause Of Death: COVID is a 2020 image macro and catchphrase template that mocks the idea of attributing any fatality, no matter how obvious the real cause, to the coronavirus. The joke grew out of a July 2020 Fox35 Orlando news report in which a motorcycle crash victim was reportedly counted as a COVID-19 death1. By late 2020, imgflip and Reddit users were turning the premise into American Chopper and Star Trek edits where impossible deaths got the same label3 4.

covid 19 memes catchphrase memes conspiracy memes exploitable templates dark humor memes

Overview

Cause Of Death: COVID, also known as Dies From Coronavirus, is a phrasal template built around attaching the label "COVID-19" to deaths whose actual cause is plainly something else, like a motorcycle crash, a sword, or being crushed into a cube3. Posts almost always pair a visibly non-medical fatality with a caption, chyron, or caption bubble that insists the real culprit was the virus1.

The humor leans on the gap between the absurd visual and the deadpan medical attribution, and sometimes carries a pointed edge of skepticism toward pandemic death-toll counting3. Common formats include news-report screencaps, Star Trek stills, and the American Chopper argument panel, with the punchline landing when the viewer reads the attached cause4.

Gallery

Origin & Background

Platform

News report (catalyst) / imgflip and Reddit (viral spread)

Date

2020

Catalyst (part one): On April 20, 2020, Minnesota state senator Scott Jensen posted a video to Twitter arguing that the CARES Act's reimbursement structure gave hospitals a financial reason to code more patient deaths as COVID-192. Catalyst (part two): On July 16, 2020, Fox35 Orlando aired a segment reporting that a man killed in a motorcycle crash had been counted in local COVID-19 death figures, with a health official saying on tape that the virus could not yet be ruled out as a contributing factor1. KonaSilat reuploaded the broadcast to YouTube on July 17, 2020, where it drew more than 4,000 views in its first year1.

Earliest known meme format: Riffing on the combined Jensen and Orlando stories, an imgflip user posted a Star Trek image macro in October 2020 showing a character crushed into a cube, with the caption attributing the death to COVID3. That post is cited by Know Your Meme as one of the first examples of the template5.

How It Spread

After the Fox35 Orlando segment went up on YouTube in July 2020, the clip got traction as proof-of-concept for the joke, and image macros riffing on it began appearing a few months later1. The October 2020 imgflip Star Trek post set an early template of pairing a clearly fatal non-medical event with a COVID caption3.

By early 2021, the format jumped onto Reddit. On January 31, 2021, redditor Fine_Molasses_1354 posted an American Chopper Argument version to r/memes, staging the back-and-forth as a fight over whether a patient's cause of death should be listed as COVID-194. Know Your Meme later indexed the template under both "Cause Of Death: COVID-19" and "Dies From Coronavirus"5.

Timeline

2020-04-20

Minnesota senator Scott Jensen posts a Twitter video claiming CARES Act rules incentivize hospitals to list more deaths as COVID-19[2].

2020-07-16

Fox35 Orlando reports that a motorcycle crash victim was counted in Orlando's COVID-19 death figures[1].

2020-07-17

YouTube account KonaSilat reuploads the Fox35 Orlando segment, where it later passes 4,000 views[1].

2020-10

An early image macro using the template is posted to imgflip, joking that a Star Trek character crushed into a cube died of COVID[3].

2021-01-31

Redditor Fine_Molasses_1354 posts an American Chopper Argument version of the meme to r/memes[4].

How to Use This Meme

Posters typically take a screenshot, still, or illustration of a death that is obviously caused by something non-viral, trauma, decapitation, being flattened, and overlay a caption, news chyron, or caption-bubble that lists the cause of death as COVID-19. The American Chopper argument panel is a common convention for the longer-form version, where one figure insists the fatality really was coronavirus4.