Fact Check: Video of COVID-19 victims piled up not from Gandhi Hospital
A video of people in full PPT gear walking around dead bodies lying on stretchers outside a building is being circulated on WhatsApp with the claim that the video is from Gandhi Hospital
By Kedar Nadella Published on 18 April 2021 7:56 AM GMT
Hyderabad: A video of people in full PPE gear walking around dead bodies lying on stretchers outside a building is being circulated on WhatsApp with the claim that the video is from Gandhi Hospital where more than 35 people died due to COVID-19 in 15 hours on 12 April.
The text accompanying the video claimed that among those who died are nine people below 45-years old, and 19 are men and 16 women.
Fact Check:
The claim that this video is from Hyderabad's Gandhi Hospital is FALSE.
NewsMeter contacted Dr. Shashidhar Reddy, a resident doctor at Gandhi Hospital and president of Junior Doctors Association (JUDA), who confirmed that the video is not from Gandhi Hospital.
Regarding the number of patients being treated at the hospital, Dr. Shashidhar said that as of Friday the number could be around 450 to 500 patients who have moderate to severe complications from COVID-19 with all them requiring oxygen support. He said that the number of deaths at the hospital has drastically increased in the last week with people dying from complications resulting from COVID-19 such as heart attacks.
He also said that many patients who come to the hospital, especially from the districts surrounding Hyderabad, arrive in a severe condition. The ambulances that bring the patients don't have the equipment for invasive ventilation due to which the condition of the patient deteriorates further by the time they reach the hospital. "Among the reasons why many patients are being sent from private hospitals to Gandhi Hospital can be because of the high costs involved in ICU treatment there which many are unable to afford," he added.
When NewsMeter searched for the video online, it found several reports and none of them mentioned Gandhi Hospital.
According to reports from NDTV and The Scroll dated 12 April, the video is from the morgue of Dr. Bhim Rao Ambedkar Memorial Hospital in Raipur, Chhattisgarh, which has reportedly run out of storage with the increase in the number of COVID-19 deaths.
The NDTV report quoted Raipur's chief medical and health officer Meera Baghel as saying, "No one could have guessed that there would be so many deaths all at once. We have enough freezers for the usual number of deaths. But we just can't understand how places with one to two deaths are reporting 10-20. If we prepare for 10-20, 50-60 people are dying. How can we arrange freezers for so many people at once? Even crematoriums are overwhelmed."
NDTV also tweeted the video from their official handle.
Hence, the video being shared on WhatsApp with the claim that bodies of COVID-19 dead are piling up at Hyderabad's Gandhi Hospital is FALSE.
