For up-to-date information regarding COVID-19 coronavirus, including prevention and treatment, please visit CDC.gov.

About

How TF Am I An Essential Worker refers to a copypasta on Twitter in which people post pictures of people in mascot costumes with the phrase "How TF am I an essential worker?" During lockdowns related to the Coronavirus, most businesses were closed unless they were declared "essential" by the government. "Essential" businesses included such grocery stores and pharmacies. As the first instance of the copypasta used a previously-existing picture, it is unclear if any of the examples were sincere.

Origin

On April 4th, 2020, Twitter user @LilTrePod^[1] posted a picture of a person in a Baskin Robbins costume captioned "How TF am I an essential worker?" The tweet gained over 58,000 retweets and 334,000 likes. However, the picture used had grown popular already^[2] as part of the Let's get this bread meme.

Spread

The tweet inspired others to post pictures of people in mascot costumes with the caption. The most popular example was posted on April 5th, 2020 by @saintashxx,^[3] who gained over 59,000 retweets and 393,000 likes (shown below, left). After saintashxx's tweet, many other users posted their own variations, though none were as popular. One of the others to gain some popularity was posted by @ImAllexx,^[4] whose variation gained over 90 retweets and 2,500 likes (shown below, right).

Various Examples

Search Interest

(Unavailable)

External References