Famous actor infected with coronavirus? Clarification here

Ever since the outbreak of the deadly coronavirus, several rumours have been doing the rounds related to the infected cases and fatalities, and one of the most recent rumours was that popular actor Daniel Radcliffe, who is famous for his role as Harry Potter in the British-American fantasy film series, has tested positive for the virus.

A fake account on Twitter, claiming to be ‘BBC Breaking News’, mentioned that the actor tested positive for coronavirus. “BREAKING: Daniel Radcliffe tests positive for coronavirus. The actor is said to be the first famous person to be publicly confirmed,” the tweet read, along with a link with the URL “bbc.co.uk”, supposedly a genuine site that has remained inactive for three years. The fake news got retweeted over 700 times and received nearly a 1000 likes before Daniel Radcliffe’s publicist denied the claim and stated, “Not true.”

The novel coronavirus, now officially called Covid-19, has claimed the lives of more than 4200 people and infected over 115800 people across the world. The virus was first identified in Wuhan, Hubei Province, in China. As the death toll and overall cases began rising rapidly across the world, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared a global health emergency.