Coronavirus: Does this image show dead people on the streets of China?

Hours after India confirmed its first positive case of novel coronavirus on Thursday, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the novel coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency of international concern.

In the light of the health emergency concern, several false narratives are going viral on social media, which are creating panic among the citizens of different countries. The image shows an aerial view of multiple people lying down in an open area, as pedestrians walk past. China is battling the outbreak of the Coronavirus, during this an image is going viral on social media claiming that it shows people in China lying dead on the ground due to the Coronavirus outbreak. It also links the image with Islamophobia in China and how the country has to make amendments with the loss of lives.

The post reads- “This is China people are falling dead like locusts. China called Islam a virus and worked very hard to extinguish it in its country.”

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This image is very viral on Facebook as well.

Fact Check-

We started our investigation by taking a screenshot of the image and running a Google reverse image search and we found a news published by Hindustan Times 25 March 2014. The headlines of the news read“24 March: top shots of the day.” We found the same image with the caption, which read, “People lay down in a pedestrian zone as part of an art project in remembrance of the 528 victims of the "Katzback" Nazi concentration camp, in Frankfurt. Reuters.”

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Taking a que from the caption of the image published by Hindustan Times, we used a keyword search on Google, which led us to the original image published by Reuters.

The description of the image reads, “People lay down in a pedestrian zone as part of an art project in remembrance of the 528 victims of the Katzbach Nazi concentration camp, in Frankfurt, March 24, 2014. The inmates of the Katzbach concentration camp, a part of the former Adler industrial factory, were forced into a death march at the concentration camps of Buchenwald and Dachau on March 24, 1945. The 528 victims of Katzbach are buried at Frankfurt's central cemetery.”

The photo was taken on March 24, 2014 in Frankfurt, Germany, where people lay down on a pedestrian area to remember the victims who lost their lives in a Nazi concentration camp. The tribute was part of an art project. A Frankfurt based photographer Kai Pfaffenback captured this photograph.

Conclusion- Thus we concluded that this claim is False. The picture was taken in 2014 in Frankfurt, Germany as a tribute to the victims who lost their lives in a Nazi concentration camp. This image has nothing to do with Coronavirus. An old and unrelated image from Germany is being falsely circulated as a photograph from present day China where many people have died due to the spread of the Coronavirus.

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