In the midst of the 2020 global COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent financial market collapse,
corporate entities have to navigate a number of truly unforeseen contagion risks. However, one
such group included those who shared their corporate identity with aspects of the rapidly evolving
coronavirus. Our results indicate the existence of sharp, dynamic and new correlations between
companies related to the term ‘corona’, outside of pre-existing interrelationships. We provide a
number of observations as to why this situation occurred.