Abstract The paper focuses on the way casual conversations, social media discourses, and radio commentaries collected in the first months of the epidemic in Poland (March — December 2020) represent a range of figurative conceptualization types concerning the COVID-19 virus, the epidemic, and their social repercussions. The paper discusses the interplay between two main powerful construals of the virus and of the development of the pandemic — a positive one, abbreviated here to ‘life,’ and a negative one, ‘death.’ Our analysis finds a complementarity between these two construals, and indicates the presence of clusters of other patterns that either negate the facts or attribute them to mystical forces. The second part of the paper is a verification of these figurative patterns against the frequencies and collocations of related keywords found in the Polish monitor corpus (monco.frazeo.pl) during the same period of time. The final part of the paper analyzes the element of humor in social media discourses concerning the pandemic, and puts the findings into a psychological framing. The analysis was conducted using qualitative metaphor Cognitive Linguistic research methods and presented with regard to metaphor identification procedure.