Was This Child Abandoned Because Both His Parents Were Infected With Covid-19? Here’s The Truth

The COVID-19 pandemic that was first discovered during the latter part of 2019 has reached unimaginable proportions with over 2 million people affected around the world as per the latest reports. With this many people infected and many countries and regions experiencing some form of a lockdown, a sense of panic and fear has engulfed many. Feeding into those very fears, many people have created fake news posts which are available across social media and chat apps similar to authentic news sources. With many people keyed into all information on the pandemic, it has been difficult to decipher between authentic and fake bulletins.

In this scenario, Fact Crescendo Sri Lanka noticed a new social media page claiming to be set-up to present news on Coronavirus worldwide posting a tragic image of a crying child alongside images of a man and woman who have been hospitalized. The page COVID 10 Worldwide posted this image on 28^th March, which instantly went viral with over 8000 shares to-date. The post which seems to have appeared in several places around the world as shown below, ran with the following accompanying grammatically incorrect text:

🙏Please pray dor him🙏

**************************

Both his parent are infected with corona virus. Help him pray for recovery

Spread and share with everyone please, prayers needed. I see no one sharing. If they were dead, everyone would share!

Here are several other Facebook users and pages who had shared the same post

FACT CHECK

In order to verify the authenticity of this very tragic story, we began with a simple Google Reverse Image check on the three images that make up the composite post.

The central image of the crying child turned out to in fact be a still from a home video posted on YouTube titled “Kid Cries After Flushing Toilet” in 2018 as can be seen in the screenshot and links provided below. The contents of the video are exactly as the title suggests. Hence the child is not associated with COVID-19.

We next looked into the image of the man in a hospital bed to the left of the child who was claimed to be his father. Yet again, this image too proved to have no connection to the current pandemic as it was originally posted alongside a major NBC News story from August 2019 on the dangers of vaping as can be seen in the links and image below:

The third image to the right of the child which was presented as the child’s mother also proved to be fake and not associated with the current COVID-19 outbreak. The image was of a teenage girl who, similar to the image of the man, had appeared as part of a Metro News story on the dangers of vaping in August 2019 as can be viewed in the links and image below:

CONCLUSION

From the above investigation, it is obvious that they have been taken from various sources and compiled together to imply to audiences that this is a family devastated by COVID-19, to incite further panic in an already difficult global healthcare crisis. As the images of the man and woman ran in two leading yet separate news sites, no further investigations were needed. The post is clearly fake and we urge the public to share verified content from authentic sources to avoid spread of misinformation.

.hocal-container {

border: 2px solid #000;

background-color: #eee;

border-radius: 5px;

padding: 16px;

margin: 16px 0

}

.hocal-container::after {

content: "";

clear: both;

display: table;

}

.hocal-container img {

float: left;

margin-right: 20px;

border-radius: 50%;

}

.hocal-container span {

font-size: 20px;

margin-right: 15px;

}

@media (max-width: 500px) {

.hocal-container {

text-align: center;

}

.hocal-container img {

margin: auto;

float: none;

display: block;

}

}