A video has been viewed thousands of times in multiple posts on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube which claim it shows Chinese police arresting people infected with the novel coronavirus.
Below is a screenshot of the misleading post:, The Hindi-language caption translates to English as: “In India, people are making Coronavirus jokes on Facebook & WhatsApp but if you want to see the reality of this disease, look at this video from China. Watch it not once, not twice but thrice and carefully that Chinese people are locked in this chaos, and police are having a hard time to arrest the infected.”, COVID-19 was first detected in the Chinese city of Wuhan in December 2019. It\xa0has since killed more than 21,031\xa0people and infected more than 465,915\xa0others worldwide, according to data from the\xa0World Health Organization (WHO)\xa0on March 27, 2020., The video has also been shared here and here on Facebook, here and here on Twitter, and here on YouTube, alongside a similar claim., The claim is false; the video shows police arresting pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong in\xa0August 2019., A reverse image search on keyframes extracted from the video in the misleading post found\xa0this video published on the YouTube channel of Rice Post, a Hong Kong-based news outlet, on September 1, 2019., The Chinese-language caption translates to English as: “31/08/2019, Police rounded up demonstrators at Prince Edward Station, sprayed pepper spray into the compartment, and beat the people inside with a stick.”, Prince Edward station is a station on Hong Kong’s MTR system., Below is a screenshot comparison of\xa0the video in the misleading posts (L) and the Rice Post’s video on YouTube (R):, The video was also\xa0published\xa0here on Facebook\xa0in the early hours of September 1, 2019\xa0by Rice Post\xa0journalist Pakkin Leung, who filmed the footage., Following months of pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong in 2019, riot police stormed Prince Edward Station in the evening of August 31, 2019, making several violent arrests., Hong Kong Police Force published this tweet on the same day, confirming they entered Prince Edward Station to “arrest offenders”., The incident was also reported by other local media; including in\xa0this report by the South China Morning Post and this by Hong Kong Free Press, both published on September 1, 2019., , Copyright © AFP 2017-2020.  All rights reserved.  Users can access and consult this website and use the share features available for personal, private, and non-commercial purposes.  Any other use, in particular any reproduction, communication to the public or distribution of the content of this website, in whole or in part, for any other purpose and/or by any other means, without a specific licence agreement signed with AFP, is strictly prohibited.  The subject matter depicted or included via links within the Fact Checking content is provided to the extent necessary for correct understanding of the verification of the information concerned.  AFP has not obtained any rights from the authors or copyright owners of this third party content and shall incur no liability in this regard.  AFP and its logo are registered trademarks.
This video shows police officers arresting protesters in Hong Kong in August 2019 | AFP Fact Check