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| - Fact Check: Old, unrelated video of bats streaming out from a roof linked to coronavirus outbreak
India Today's Anti Fake News War Room (AFWA) has found that the viral video is around nine years old and is from Florida in the US. It has no connection with the current coronavirus outbreak.
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India Today Fact Check
The viral video is around nine years old and is from Miami, USA.
Amid the coronavirus outbreak in China and WHO declaring it a global health emergency, a video of bats being removed from a rooftop is doing the rounds on social media. It is being claimed that these are chrysanthemum bats that carry coronavirus. In the video, hundreds of bats can be seen hiding underneath the tiles of the rooftop of a house in China’s Wuhan, from where the virus is believed to have originated.
India Today’s Anti Fake News War Room (AFWA) has found that the viral video is around nine years old and is from Florida in the US. It has no connection with the current coronavirus outbreak.
The archived version of the post can be seen here.
AFWA received the message on its helpline (7370007000). The message with the video reads: "The primary source of coronavirus has been found. It turns out that many house roofs in Wuhan, Hubei Province are heavily infested with chrysanthemum bats, a type of bat that carry the virus in their body. When snakes eat these bats, snakes become secondary carriers and when Chinese people eat those snakes, they become human carriers of the virus and spread to other humans via air and other public structural surfaces by coughing, sneezing, runny nose etc.."
The video is quite viral on Facebook with similar claims.
Is this video from China?
No, this video is not from China. We found the truth after we broke the video into keyframes through InVid tool, and ran a reverse search on one of them. According to some news articles, the video is from Miami where a team of builders from Istueta Roofing Company removed roof tiles to discover the home of hundreds of bats. The news report published in April 2012 also states that these were Mexican Fruit Bats.
We also found the longer version of the video uploaded by 'Istueta Roofing' on their YouTube channel on June 10, 2011. One can see the viral part of the video in chunks from 6 minutes 55 seconds mark.
The website of Istueta Roofing clearly says it is the ''South Florida's Most Trusted Roofer since 1985".
Did coronavirus come from bats?
Possibly yes, but not yet established. A study at UC Berkeley
However, it is not yet been proven that bats are the original source of coronavirus. Also according to WHO, the animal source of 2019-nCoV, the strain of coronavirus which is responsible for the outbreak of this disease, has not yet been identified.
Is there any connection between coronavirus and bat soup?
As of now, there is no evidence to prove it. Some of the videos of people having bat soup are also being circulated, claiming that it is responsible for the outbreak of coronavirus. However, many of these videos turned out to be older and from places other than China. There is no official confirmation that bat soup could be a reason behind the deadly virus.
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