There were plenty of concerns and conspiracies around 5G circulating before the coronavirus outbreak.
But these seem to have escalated – with much-shared posts online suggesting a link between the illness and the new mobile phone technology.
Sars-CoV-2 is a virus that causes the illness Covid-19. Viruses are bits of genetic material coated in protein which infiltrate the cells of living things in order to reproduce. They often originate in animals.
The genome of this coronavirus has been sequenced so we can see that it looks a lot like viruses that circulate in the bat and pangolin population, suggesting that, like many other viruses, it jumped from animals to humans – and then began to pass from human to human.
There is no biological mechanism by which 5G – which uses radio waves – could have any bearing on this illness. They are just completely different things.
Dr Brendan Wren at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine described it as “both a physical and biological impossibility”.
