Fact Check: Bats found on roof of a house is not from Wuhan
By Satya Priya BN Published on 4 Feb 2020 5:02 AM GMTHyderabad: Coronavirus infestation has raised concerns worldwide about the eating habits of Chinese. After the spread of Coronavirus, many posts have gone viral on social media about Wuhan, which is the epicenter of a new pandemic.
A new video is in circulation where the infestation of bats can be seen on the roof of a building. This video has been shared with a claim that "You will be shocked to see Bats, on one house roof in Wuhan. There are thousands of houses for Coronavirus. Burn the whole city in ashesā¦The coronavirus source. It turns out that roofs in Hubei China are covered with Chrysanthemum bats, type of bat."
Many others have also shared this video with a similar claim.
It has gone viral in facebook too in the past 2 days.
Fact check:
After taking screenshots of the video and performing reverse image search in google with keywords 'bat infestation on roof', we found video uploaded on a YouTube channel of Istueta Roofing on July 5, 2011. The video had a description that says 'Our crew is in for a surprise when they begin the removal process of our clients' old roof and hundreds of bats come flying out from underneath the tiles. This was unexpected! (Bat Removal is not a service that we provide.) A special thanks to our Production Manager, Danny Argote, for getting this on camera.'
The roofing crew found bat infestation on a roof of a house in Miami, Florida, USA. So this video is 9 years old and is from Florida, Miami, USA and NOT from China.
Here is the link:
There is also a longer version of the video in which a truck with Istueta Roofing written on it can also be seen. Istuesta roofing is a company instituted in Florida, Maimi, USA which handles replacement of roofs of houses.
This claim has been fact checked by Fact Crescendo, which proves that this claim is false.
Hence, the claim that the video is from Wuhan, China is FALSE. This video belongs to 2011 and is from Florida, USA.