In view of increasing COVID-19 cases in few states, a post enlisting few precautions to be followed is being shared widely on social media. The post claims that this list is issued by the ICMR. Through this article, let’s fact-check the claim made in the post.
Claim: List of precautions issued by ICMR in view of COVID-19
Fact: There is no such information available on the ICMR website and social media accounts regarding the precautions to be followed in view of COVID-19. When the same list was doing rounds on social media in 2020, ICMR denied issuing any such list. Hence the claim made in the post is FALSE.
Search on ICMR’s official website and official social media accounts did not yield any such information related to precautions to be followed in view of COVID-19.
Further search led us to a Times of India news article dated 15 March 2020 in which Dr. Devi Shetty, Chairman, and founder, Narayana Health penned few precautionary measures to be followed in order to cope with the COVID-19 pandemic. Few of the precautions are similar to the precautions listed in the post. Hence, this article could be the basis for the precautionary list in the post.
The same list is doing rounds on social media at least since March 2020. A Facebook post that shared the same list back in March 2020 can be seen here. FACTLY had debunked this message then. When ICMR was contacted then, they mentioned that if they come up with any such instructions, they would post them on their website and official social media handles. One can see that no such list of precautionary measures, as mentioned in the post, was published anywhere by ICMR. All these establish the fact that these precautions are not recommended by ICMR.
ICMR though its official twitter handle have clarified on 06 May 2021 that the they did not issue any such guidelines or advisory, and the posts attributing these guidelines to ICMR are fake.
In view of the increasing COVID-19 cases in the country, misleading posts like these are being shared on social media platforms.
To sum it up, ICMR did not release this list of COVID-19 precautions.
Update (MAY 07, 2021): This post has been updated with the clarification tweet from ICMR.
