This Oh So Accurate Response to a Social Media Post By Delta Air Lines is Going Viral

The social media team at Delta Air Lines has taken a short break from posting new content after its last Twitter post stirred up some pretty strong feelings about the pandemic in just seven small words.

Usually, Delta’s social team post almost daily on Twitter, trying to engage with some followers about some of the day’s trending topics. Only recently, Delta has jumped on the Wordle bandwagon and made its very own ‘how it started, how it’s going’ meme.

Delta also tries to drive engagement, posting interactive polls and asking followers to post photos and comments in reply to questions they pose. As you might expect, the social media team is more than accustomed to receiving customer service complaints in the replies, but occasionally, a response is too good to be ignored.

Last Thursday, Delta posed the simple and innocent-sounding question: ‘Name a city that changed your life’.

Some followers went with the kind of response that Delta was no doubt expecting – the city they got engaged or married or even gave birth. There were lots of cities to choose from but one cropped up time and time again.

Wuhan.

Wuhan is the capital of Hubei Province in China, and it is widely believed to be where the SARS-CoV-2 virus originated in late 2019.

The problem is that Chinese authorities dispute that version of events, and Beijing continues to deny the possibility that COVID-19 either emerged in a wet market where exotic animals were illegally sold or in a leak from Wuhan’s Institute of Virology where studies were being conducted on various coronaviruses.

Instead, Chinese authorities prefer explanations such as the virus entering Wuhan on frozen food imported from abroad. Officials have also suggested the virus could have emerged from a U.S. military lab leak.

China and the United States have been at loggerheads over the origins of the virus and now the two sides have clashed over pandemic-induced flight suspensions.

Last week, the U.S. government suspended 44 flights from the United States to China by four Chinese airlines in a tit for tat move after Beijing barred a slew of Chinese flights from United Airlines, Delta and American Airlines.

China says the route suspensions were a ‘circuit breaker’ measure that was necessary because passengers had tested positive for the highly-infectious Omicron variant after arrival.

Liu Pengyu, a spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in the United States described the U.S. imposed route suspensions as “very unreasonable”.

Delta Air Lines landed itself in hot water in December when a Shanghai-bound flight turned back nearly six hours into what should have been an 11 hours flight to China because of new restrictions that had been imposed.