Film Scene Shared as Mass Graves in Italy Due to COVID-19 Deaths

The image is taken from a 2011 film ‘Contagion’ directed by Steven Soderbergh.

An image of mass graves is being circulated on various social media platforms to insinuate that it is from Italy where people are being buried en masse.

(Photo: Altered by The Quint)

CLAIM

As coronavirus forces cities across the world into a lockdown, Italy remains one of the worst-affected with over 63,000 positive cases and 6,000 deaths. Amid this, an image showing mass graves has been shared on various social media platforms to insinuate that it is from Italy where people are being buried en masse.

(Source: Facebook/Screenshot)

At the time of writing this piece, the post had over 2,000 likes and was shared 4,8000 times.

TRUE OR FALSE?

False.

Contrary to the claim, the image is not from Italy but is taken from a scene from the film ‘Contagion’ released in 2011.

WHAT WE FOUND

A reverse image search on Yandex search engine directed us to several articles about the film which carried the aforementioned image. We also came across a blog about the film with this very image.

(Source: Sanook/Screenshot)

We then looked up the trailer of the film. The viral image appears at 2 minutes 20 seconds into the video.

(Source: YouTube/Screenshot)

Hence, an image clipped from a film scene is being used to falsely claim that it shows mass graves in Italy.

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