‘No April Fool’s’: People call for day of pranks to be cancelled amid coronavirus pandemic

People have called for April Fool’s Day to be cancelled this year amid the coronavirus pandemic.

Usually when 1 April comes around, people revel in joking and playing pranks on one another, in keeping with the tradition of April Fool’s Day.

However, in light of the global impact of the Covid-19 outbreak, many have expressed that they don’t feel comfortable observing the day for 2020.

Several Twitter users voiced this view on the social media platform, with one person saying there is “absolutely no need” for the occasion.

“No April Fool’s jokes tomorrow. Please. We are the fools,” one person tweeted.

“No April Fool’s jokes this year. We’re traumatised enough. Thanks,” someone else said.

Lawyer and LGBT+ activist Brian Sims advised his 64,000 followers to not consider taking part in any April Fool’s pranks.

“Absolutely no one will think any kind of an April Fool’s joke is funny tomorrow,” he wrote.

“Do yourself a solid, and stop yourself before you even start.”

While some companies are still releasing April Fool’s Day promotions this year, Google is not one of them.

It has become an annual tradition for Google to release several April Fool’s jokes for internet users, a custom that began two decades ago.

However, this year the firm stated it was focused on being “helpful to people”, and so would not launch any hoax products.

“Our highest goal right now is to be helpful to people, so let’s save the jokes for next April, which will undoubtedly be a whole lot brighter than this one,” Lorraine Twohill, Google’s head of marketing, wrote in a company memo.

“We’ve already stopped any centralised April Fool’s efforts but realise there may be smaller projects within teams that we don’t know about. Please suss out those efforts and make sure your teams pause on any jokes they may have planned — internally or externally.”