Posts have been circulating on social media claiming that a 93-year-old man who recently recovered from Coronavirus in Italy has shared an emotional message.
The text further states: “After the 93-year-old man in Italy got better in the hospital, he was told to pay for the ventilator for one day, and the old man cried. The doctor advised him not to cry over the bill. What the old man said made all the doctors cry. Old man said, “I don’t cry because of the money I have to pay. I can pay all the money.” *I cry because I have been breathing God’s air for 93 years, but I never pay for it. It takes €500 to use a ventilator in a hospital for one day. Do you know how much I owe God ? I didn’t thank God for that before.”
The same post can be seen here and here.
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FACT CHECK
We fact-checked the above post and found that the man shown in it, has no links to COVID-19.
When we came across these claims on social media, we also found identical posts but with a different photo such as below. That was the first red flag.
We also ran the image from the original claims on the Google Reverse Image Search. It led us to a BuzzFeed article with an image of the same man. The caption states: 90-year-old Bill Moore was reunited with a lost love letter he wrote to his wife Bernadean during World War II.
We saw the source of the BuzzFeed photo to be ABC News. So we further checked for Bill Moore on ABC News.
It led us to an article about a WW II veteran Bill Moore who got emotional while reading a letter to his wife.
In conclusion, according to the above information, the man Bill Moore has been falsely linked to a story about Coronavirus and his recovery from it.
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