Fact check: No, the media didn't report the same boy died of COVID-19 in three different countries

Hannah Hudnall, USA TODAY
·3 min read
2

The claim: Articles reported that the same boy died of COVID-19 in three different countries

Social media users are claiming a variety of news outlets repurposed a young child's death, supposedly reporting that the same boy had died in three different locations.

An Oct. 17 Instagram post features what appears to be three separate articles accompanied by a picture of the same boy. The articles referred to children who passed away in 2020 from COVID-19 in Belgium, Portugal and the U.K.

"The same child dies in 3 different countries from COVID – U.K., Portugal and Belgium," reads text in the image posted to Instagram. "This is how the fake news media works in the world."

The post garnered more than 300 likes in the first 12 hours.

The claim is false. The articles featured in the post reported on the deaths of three separate children.

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USA TODAY reached out to the user who shared the post, but they declined to comment.

Outlets reported three different deaths

An article published by the Daily Mail is featured in the Instagram post. The article, published at the end of March 2020, focused on a 14-year-old boy in Portugal who died from COVID-19. The boy, Vitor Godinho, was pictured in the article.

The second article from the Instagram post was published by the Daily Express and reported that a 12-year-old girl from Belgium had died from the virus. She was not named or pictured in the article. Godinho's death, as well as the COVID-related deaths of several other children in Europe, was mentioned, and a picture of him was included.

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The third article highlighted in the Instagram post was published by The Daily Record, whose story didn't mention Godinho or include a picture of him. It described a 13-year-old boy from the U.K., named Ismail Mohamed Abdulwahab, who had passed away from the virus. No picture of Abdulwahab was provided in the article.

This claim was previously debunked by PolitiFact and FactCheck.org when earlier iterations of it appeared online in 2020.

Our rating: False

Based on our research, we rate FALSE the claim that the articles reported on the same child's death of COVID-19 in three different countries. The articles reported on the deaths of a 12-year-old girl, a 13-year-old boy and a 14-year-old boy.

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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Fact check: Articles focus on deaths of three children from COVID-19