evidence: To be clear, these theories are wrong. As you'll see from our fact checks linked throughout this article, there's no connection between 5G and coronavirus, and no evidence of any health risk from 5G. But it's not clear that simply dismissing them is the right approach. Given the upheaval the coronavirus pandemic has caused, people are understandably worried and looking for answers. And to give those answers well, we'll need to understand where these theories come from. Because while the idea that 5G is harmful may seem to have exploded from nowhere during the coronavirus pandemic, in fact it has been steadily building online for years. And its origins can be traced back even further, to panics about earlier generations of mobile phone and wireless technology at the turn of the millennium. [...] While the conspiracy theories about 5G and the coronavirus pandemic burst into public awareness at the start of April, they have been building online for months. We started seeing the link between 5G and coronavirus claims in the second half of January, shortly after the virus started getting significant UK media coverage, but before the outbreak had been declared a pandemic.