Numerous images and videos of dead bodies and mass grave are doing rounds as viral on various social media platforms with the claim that these are images or videos of the Coronavirus victims in Italy.
A video shared on twitter with the message, “HORRIBLE UNTHINKABLE TO SEE DEAD BODIES AT ITALY coronavirus. Maas graveyard”.
There are numerous such claims with different contents being shared on social media, which News Sense Fact Check team found misleading thus started its investigation.
While going through the viral video showing mass grave, one can hear the anchor in the video mentions some unrealistic causes and terms, one such term is riptide virus and not coronavirus, as the cause for death. While an easy search on Google using ‘riptide virus’ revealed that the video is from a scene from a science fiction ‘Pandemic’ released in 2007.
The full film is available on YouTube and the viral scene can be viewed between 1:01 and 1:02. The film, ‘Pandemic’ is a science-fiction series where an epidemiologist and an FBI agent trying to stop a deadly virus that is fast spreading from human to human in Los Angeles.
Meanwhile, the following misleading viral image on being searched on Yandex Photo Search led to a photo by Reuters published in March 2014 with the following details, which read, “People lay down in a pedestrian zone as part of an art project in remembrance of the 528 victims of the Katzbach Nazi concentration camp, in Frankfurt, March 24, 2014.
Thus, News Sense Fact Check Team has come to the conclusion that both the images and the videos are real but the context with which they are used is Fake, one image is a part of an art project while other was a scene from the science-fiction fiction Pandemic released in the year 2007.
Claim: Mass Grave of Coronavirus victims in Italy
Conclusion: Scene from 2007 Science Fiction ‘Pandemic’
