A video of hospital patients on beds in the open on roads and under shade, with their relatives standing around them is being falsely shared to claim that it shows a “dangerous incident” at Old City in Hyderabad.
However, we found that this video is not from Hyderabad’s Old City but from Lahore, Pakistan and has no coronavirus context at all.
This claim is obviously being made in the context of the coronavirus pandemic, since many of the patients and their companions can be seen wearing masks – the insinuation is that these are COVID-19 patients who have not received admission into a hospital and are forced to be on the roads due to a lack of beds.
CLAIM
The video shows a large number of people waiting outside a building. Some of the companions of the patients can be seen fanning them or rubbing their backs and the patients appear to be in distress.
While many people, companions and patients alike, can be seen wearing masks, at least one person can be seen wearing what looks like a PPE kit.
We found many people sharing this video on Facebook with the message: “Dangerous situation in Old City (hyderabad)”.
WHAT WE FOUND
On running a reverse image search on the keyframes of the video using the software Invid, we came across an article which carried visuals from the viral video and claimed that these patients were waiting outside a hospital in Lahore which had caught fire and they were not COVID-positive.
Using this as a clue, we searched for news reports about a fire at a Lahore hospital and came across a report by Pakistani TV news channel Samaa.TV, which confirmed that there had indeed been a fire in the surgical emergency ward of Services Hospital Lahore on Saturday, 13 June.
This had led to almost 40 patients who were being treated in the ward to be evacuated and shifted to another ward. In the video embedded in the report, we could see visuals of patients being wheeled out and lying on beds in the open.
We also found a tweet by Pakistani news outlet The Express Tribune which carried a video of the same incident and showed patients being wheeled out. This, too, said that the fire had happened in the emergency ward and not the COVID-19 ward.
Journalist Madiha Abid Ali took to Twitter to call out people sharing photos of the incident and the viral video with a coronavirus context as fake news. She also called out a celebrity who had shared the viral clip connecting it to coronavirus, specifying that it had happened due to a short circuit in the surgical emergency OT.
Lastly, we compared a photo uploaded by a Google user of the Services Hospital Lahore to the visuals seen in the viral video and found that they match. The same structure of the building can be seen.
Therefore, it is clear that a video from a Lahore hospital post a fire is being falsely shared as the situation in Hyderabad, India and being falsely connected to coronavirus.
(You can read all our coronavirus related fact-checked stories here.)
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