Fact Check: 2013 video of dead bodies at Hyderabad hospital circulated amid COVID-19

A video has been shared multiple times on Facebook where it claims to show COVID-19 victims at a hospital in the city of Hyderabad in Andhra Pradesh, India. However a fact check by AFP has revealed that the footage was published in reports about unclaimed bodies at a Hyderabad hospital in 2013. 

The one-minute 43 second video shows piled up bags of bodies and the caption claims it to be shot in Hyderabad’s Osmania Hospital, which is a government run facility in the Telangana Capital. 

A watermark on the video read, “INDTODAY” and a further keyword search on Google revealed that Ind Today is a Hyderabad based news agency which had uploaded the video on its YouTube page in 2013. 

Responding to the misleading posts regarding the video, which has been shared over 66,000 times, Ind Today in a Facebook post said, “The video showing several piles of dead bodies, kept for days together in the morgue, is actually six year old. It’s YouTube video published on December 25, 2013.” The agency asked the public to not panic and mistake it to be a fresh video. 

Apart from Ind Today, the video was aired by many television channels such as ETV Andhra Pradesh in 2013.