The montage first appeared on social media in May 2020. But the verification backfired and the story of the photo’s misuse was picked up by social media accounts championing the idea that Covid-19 isn’t deadly and that the number of deaths from the virus has been exaggerated. Italian fact-checking site NeXt Quotidiano was perhaps the first site to report on the misuse of the photo, back in March 2020. Our team did a quick search on social media and discovered that this photo has been wrongly used to illustrate victims of the Covid pandemic since it first began. © Simona Ventura A photo used to cast doubt on the dangerous reality of the Covid-19 pandemic

The wrongly attributed photo that appeared in the first version has been replaced. This screengrab shows the 46th second of the revised version of the documentary trailer. It was taken by Alberto Pizzoli, a photographer with the press agency AFP, on October 5, 2013. If you carry out a reverse image search (click here to find out how) using the free online tool InVid WeVerify, then you can pull up the original photo. This photo shows migrants who died in a shipwreck and has been wrongly connected to the Covid-19 pandemic This post from December 31, 2021, for example, says: “In this Covid operation, everything is false!” Some of the captions claim that the misuse of this image is proof that the dangerousness of the virus has been exaggerated or invented. The montage has been circulating on Facebook and Twitter in French, English and Italian, like in this post from December 29, 2021. The caption explains that the photo shows the victims of a shipwreck off the coast of Lampedusa in 2013, not victims of the Covid-19 pandemic in Bergamo, Italy. In the montage, a colour filter has been added to the photo as well as a label explaining that this photo was used out of context.

© Simona VenturaĪ montage featuring the photo has also been circulating on Facebook, like in this post from December 27. This screengrab, which includes the photo of the row of coffins, was featured in the trailer for the documentary “The Seven Days of Bergamo” by director Simona Ventura.

Letting Go In Bergamo by Daniel Hansen