Pre-wedding photographs shared with false claims of corona patient in love with doctor
Claims: Few pictures of a couple’s pre-wedding photoshoot went viral on social media with false claims that the man is a coronavirus patient in a hospital who fell in love with the female doctor who was treating him. It also claimed that the couple got engaged in the same hospital in Egypt.
These pictures include a man putting a ring on the woman’s finger and few others show them looking at each other lovingly.
The viral posts has caption that says, “A corona patient fell in lôve with the doctor who treated him.he took two months after that both of them got engaged in the hospital of Egypt.”
One viral post in a group on Facebook has garnered almost 1,000 reactions.
The archive is here.
Hindi news website, Punjab Kesari, published a news report with the same claims of a doctor getting engaged to a patient in Egypt’s hospital and that is this something positive to look at amid the pandemic.
TRUTH
Through reverse image search, Arabic news reports containing the same images were found. It also contained extra photographs of the couple from the hospital and said that these are Egyptian doctors Mohamed Fahmy and Aya Mosbah, who got engaged during the coronavirus pandemic in Dar Al-Shifa Hospital in Egypt’s Mansourah city. The article did not mention that one of them was a suffering through COVID-19, as per the claims.
The photographs in the said articles carry the watermark sign of “MOHAMED SELIM PHOTOGRAPHY”. On his Facebook account, the photographer named Selim from Mansourah had uploaded these pictures on May 25 and tagged Mohamed Fahmy and Aya Mosbah (the couple).
The post is archived here.
According to India Today, Selim said that he clicked these pictures as part of a pre-wedding shoot. He also said that the couple is doing fine, and as of now, none of them is infected with the coronavirus. He said the idea of a pre-wedding photoshoot in a hospital was to spread optimism among people in these trying times.
The couple’s Facebook account however shows that they were engaged in 2018.
Hence, the couple had clearly known each other and were engaged since 2018 which dismisses the claims of them meeting in the hospital while one was a patient tested positive for coronavirus.