You could have skipped reading entirely; it's conspiracy clickbait. To the puzzle-solving mind, an anomalous clue is the unicorn you spend your whole life chasing. There is a well-known conspiracy community around covid. It follows that this is trying to harvest a couple thousand in revenue by baiting people who are playing with covid conspiracies, by enticing them with the false promise of an anomalous clue.

I hope the author is reading these comments and sees me calling him a piece of shit.