Old ‘Emergency Exercise’ video at an airport in Senegal is falsely shared in the context of COVID-19 outbreak - FACTLY
Sai Krishna Muthyanolla
March 19, 2020
A video of few passengers being rescued near a runway is being shared on social media with the claim that it shows passengers infected with Coronavirus on an Ethiopian Airlines flight from Italy that reached Addis Ababa airport in the evening. Let’s check the authenticity of the claim about the video.
Video of passengers infected with Coronavirus on an Ethiopian Airlines flight from Italy that reached Addis Ababa airport.
Fact: The video is of an ‘Emergency Exercise’ at Blaise Diagne International Airport (Senegal) in November 2019. So, the video is of a drill that was conducted a month earlier before the first Coronavirus case was detected in China. Hence, the claim is FALSE.
In the video, the aeroplane has the text ‘Senegal’ on it suggesting the aeroplane to be related to Senegal.
When searched on YouTube with keywords ‘Senegal airplane rescue’, a video with similar visuals and the same logo was found in the search results. When one goes through the video of ‘Dakaractu Tv’, it was found to be of an ‘Emergency Exercise’ at Blaise Diagne International Airport in Senegal. The drill took place on 28 November 2019. As per the report of ‘Dakaractu Tv’, the training at Blaise Diagne International Airport was conducted to evaluate the capacity of officials to respond to various crises that may arise during operations at the airport. In the video, the organizer of the exercise, Xavier Mary, the Director-General of LAS (Limak-Aibd-Summa), has thanked Air Senegal for the provision of an aircraft for the ‘Emergency Exercise’. So, the video is of a drill that was conducted a month earlier before the first Coronavirus case was detected in China in December 2019. More information about the incident can be read here.
To summarize, an old video of ‘Emergency Exercise’ at an airport in Senegal is being falsely shared as ‘passengers infected with Coronavirus on an Ethiopian Airlines flight from Italy’.
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