Man in China Lies About Having Coronavirus Because He Didn’t Want to Go to Work

We’ve all been there, those dreaded mornings when we can’t seem to drag ourselves out of bed to go to work. Most of us just suck it up and go anyway, but some just can’t refuse the opportunity to pull off a Ferris Bueller and call in sick. With the ongoing coronavirus panic, it’s an easy out.

One man in Jiangsu Province did exactly that and had the guts to lie about having the deadly disease because he wanted to play hooky. Of course, this didn’t go as planned, and caused his workplace to temporarily shut down.

On February 13, the man identified only by the last name Zhu claimed that he had the coronavirus, forcing his company to cease operations for three days and 47 employees to be put under home isolation.

He told his company that he was shopping at the same supermarket as a confirmed coronavirus patient, on the same day and around the same time. He even provided timestamped 'proof' of his purchases there.

He later confessed to faking the evidence, after the police found loopholes in his story and discovered obvious traces of tampering on the documents he presented. As it turns out, Zhu was not sick at all; he simply didn’t feel like going to work, Changzhou Daily Newspaper reported.

Zhu will serve three months of jail time for spreading false information, followed by a six-month probation. Now he really won’t have to go to work anymore.

He isn’t the only one who has lied about contracting the coronavirus.

In another mind-boggling case, a man with the last name Zuo called the emergency hotline multiple times claiming that he was exhibiting symptoms of the coronavirus. However, during his stay at the hospital, he tested negative for the coronavirus. It was later discovered that he had made up the stories about feeling unwell, claiming that he was just curious about what happens to coronavirus patients after they are admitted to a hospital. He wanted to “test” the hospital’s response, The Paper reported.

Meanwhile, a woman in Tianjin dialled the emergency hotline a whopping 16 times to report that her boyfriend had contracted the coronavirus. However, her boyfriend was tracked down by the police and tested negative for the coronavirus. According to The Paper, the woman made the false reports to teach her boyfriend a lesson after a couples tiff.

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