Humor

The Real People Behind the Coronavirus

Exploring the hygiene companies behind COVID-19.

Reading Time: 3 minutes

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By Laurina Xie

Hey, you. This virus sucks, doesn’t it? Google is having the time of its life as people scramble to figure out how to use Google Meets and Google Classroom. Teachers are laughing in absolute joy as they give you every single assignment, taking 15 minutes out of their day and two hours out of yours. You, on the other hand, are crushed under the combined might of SEVEN-plus teachers. Obviously, people are either getting cucked or taking free vacations.

But, a few groups of people are really getting a kick out of this crisis. They’re raking in record-high profits! Can you guess who they are? Hygiene companies! Purell, Kleenex, and even Kimberly-Clark are absolutely popping off! In a month, they went from irrelevant to supremely important: they have one of their products every 100 square feet! While restaurants, small business chains, and retail stores flop, these guys are coming out on top, smelling like a fresh batch of sanitizing wipes.

They’re almost doing a little too well. It seems like they’ve been capitalizing right at the beginning at the outbreak, with face mask sales suddenly rising even when multiple media sites claimed that face masks did not prevent you from catching the coronavirus. Amazon and Target’s shelves had all been cleared within the first month as foolish consumers flocked to cleanse themselves. Doesn’t it seem strange for Americans, a group of people notoriously known to wait to the last minute, to flee to their nearest Costco to stock up on toilet paper and hand soap to protect themselves from a virus that was largely believed to be restrained to the Eastern Hemisphere? If this isn’t a miracle for baby wipes, I don’t know what is!

The answer is all too obvious to a genius like me. The aforementioned companies that were tired of their sales being stagnant and boring and tired that no one cared about hygiene, were behind all of this. These companies, knowing that they couldn’t band together to just form a monopoly on their goods, joined forces to create an innovative solution—a solution that would indirectly lead to massive profits and keep their hands clean.

They spent months slowly tweaking the virus’s genetic code to their needs, maximizing contagion to instill fear within the population while lowering lethality to keep customers coming back. Their scientists and engineers, after previously focusing on how to eliminate pathogens, definitely knew how to create one that could not be stopped after studying them for so long. After all, the longer it lives, the longer people buy their products. News sources continue to post record-high numbers and spread fear all around the country, doing the bidding of these corporations without even knowing it. In every room of every school, a bottle of Purell sat innocently at the doorway. All over the world, soap was in demand for the first time. The first step of their plan was complete.

Then, they cleverly managed the demand-supply chain. Knowing that their current production status would not be able to keep up with the influx of orders, they instead used that information to their advantage. They set aside about 100,000 packages of their products in their headquarters. Why? Well, as the shelves were emptied and Amazon ran out of goods, people would still be looking to replenish their emptied hygiene products. Disguised as hundreds of separate sellers on Ebay, Craigslist, and even the black market, representatives from these companies began to slowly sell away their reserves at outrageous prices, getting the companies even more big bucks.

It’s begun. The first experiment has been successful. Inevitably, there will be more and more until these hygiene superpowers become the men and women who rule this world from the shadows, controlling economies and lives like puppets on a string.