False claims flying around the world

Here’s a selection of misinformation debunked by AFP’s fact check service.

NOT WUHAN MARKET

A video viewed more than 88,000 times on Facebook purported to show the market in Wuhan where the virus strain materialised.

In reality, it was filmed at an Indonesian market.

The misleading post was published on an account in the Philippines on January 26, 2020.

The footage showed bats, rats, snakes and an assortment of other animal meat products being sold at a bustling market.

However, a reverse image search using key frames extracted from the video led to another identical YouTube clip uploaded on July 20, 2019.

AFP was able to confirm the video was in fact captured at the Langowan market in Indonesia’s North Sulawesi province.

FAKE DEATH PROJECTIONS

In Sri Lanka, a Facebook post shared thousands of times claimed doctors were projecting that the entire population of Wuhan — a city of 11 million people — would likely die of the novel coronavirus.

This is false; Chinese authorities have made no such projection.

The post also claimed the virus could be caught by eating the meat of the Chinese cobra.

This unsettling theory has not yet been established.

SALT WATER CAN’T KILL VIRUS Multiple posts on Weibo, Twitter and Facebook shared in January claimed top Chinese respiratory expert Zhong Nanshan had told people to rinse their mouths with salt water solution to prevent infection from a new virus outbreak.

But the claim is bogus; the expert’s team said saline would not “kill” the new virus and urged people not to believe or share medically-inaccurate online rumours.

CONSPIRACY THEORIES Multiple posts on Facebook and Twitter alleged that the novel coronavirus was created on purpose — with theories including that it was manufactured by the US Centres for Disease

Control and Prevention.

The posts included patents to buffer their claim. But these were in fact patents registered in an effort to combat different strains of coronavirus, for example by developing vaccines.

HOSPITAL CONSTRUCTION

A photo shared hundreds of times on Twitter and Facebook claimed to show a new hospital in Wuhan that was built in just 16 hours especially for coronavirus patients.

In reality, it is a stock image of a random building that has circulated online since at least January 2019.

Although a new hospital is indeed being built in Wuhan, AFP found it was still in the very early stages of development.