- While the coronavirus has already killed more than 5,500 people in Italy, a viral video claims to show the corpses of victims in the street.
- The sequence compiles two separate videos.
- One of them is taken out of context, since it shows a young woman who is sick but not affected by the coronavirus.
“The corpses litter the streets in Italy…. A cold ?? "," Scenario of the worst in Italy "," In Italy, we fall in the streets. These images, we saw them in China in January, that should have alerted ”…
The legends may vary according to the tweets, the video, it, multiplies the views by tens of thousands and shares in France, but also in other countries. And for good reason: it claims to show Italians dying in the street because of the coronavirus epidemic which has already caused the death of more than 5,500 people in the country.
The corpses litter the streets in Italy .... A flu ?? pic.twitter.com/c1ns6IQUWr
- Thierry MALGOUYRE (@thierymalgouyre) March 22, 2020The 49-second sequence compiles two separate passages. Its first ten seconds thus show a body stretched out in the middle of a street, while a man resembling a policeman takes a few steps nearby, while neighbors observe the scene from their balcony. The rest of the video shows a woman, inert, lying on a bench, who ends up being examined by two people in white coveralls.
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The second sequence was well filmed in Italy. However, it shows neither a corpse nor a case of coronavirus, but a young woman of twenty-three who collapsed on a bench in Salerno (Campania).
As the local daily L'Occhio di Salerno recounts, after police and emergency intervention, she was taken into hospital, where a test found that she was negative for the coronavirus and simply suffered bronchitis and anemia.
The newspaper had also broadcast this sequence itself on Wednesday 18 March, simply referring to "a woman rescued on the street in Salerno". He was still unaware of these details, obtained the day after the broadcast of this video filmed in Caduti Civili di Brescia square, as can be seen on Google Maps.
A first unidentified sequence
However, we were unable to determine where the first sequence of the video was filmed, showing a man lying in the middle of a street. Several elements may however suggest that it was filmed in Italy, like the uniform of the police (very similar to that of the riflemen).
We find the first occurrences of this video on March 20, notably on the site of the "independent newspaper" Etruria News, in an article comparing these images to those of bodies lying on the Chinese streets a few months ago. Joined by 20 Minutes , the site did not respond to our requests before the article appeared. But the name of the video file ("WhatsApp-Video-2020-03-20-at-21.02.54.mp4") suggests that this sequence was transmitted to it by WhatsApp, as a number of intoxicants.
The same day, an Italian surfer had also shared this sequence on his Facebook account, with the caption: "I am speechless, people who pass out on the street as in the videos you have seen in China, we don't have not reached the peak [of the epidemic]… MAXIMUM ALERT ”. A comment that he repeated word for word to illustrate the video of the young woman cared for in Salerno, in a post posted online in stride. Contacted by 20 Minutes , the Internet user also did not respond to our requests before the article appeared.
At the time when the coronavirus epidemic only affected China, numerous videos claiming to show corpses or sudden fainting in the street had circulated. Without the filmed scenes - often difficult to verify - necessarily correspond to the description that was given, as explained in particular by our colleagues from LCI and Le Monde . And as we had seen on one of them, which actually showed people sleeping on the street.
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