A video of a young woman walking amongst a group of people bowing to her, touching her feet and offering flowers is doing the rounds on social media. It has been shared with the claim, "She was a nurse in Trivandrum Medical College. She completed IAS & posted as Disrict Collector in Kudagu. Becos of her nursing experience, she cud help Kudagu District to totally come out of Covid. ANEES KANMANI JOY- She is getting a special treat from the PPL of Kodagu."

The video is also widespread on Facebook.

Fact-check

Alt News had debunked this video earlier this month when viral messages claimed it's an old clip of the 19-year-old Dalit woman who was allegedly tortured and gang-raped by four upper-caste men in Hathras. We broke the video into multiple keyframes and reverse searched them on different search engines such as Bing, Yandex and Google. One of the searches on Yandex revealed that the same video was uploaded by a YouTube user MD Adil Fayaz on February 19, 2020.

We found that MD Adil Fayaz was felicitated by an online marketing company called "Safe Shop". Alt News got in touch with Adil Fayaz who informed that the woman is a senior associate with Safe Shop. Boomlive also spoke with officials at Safe Shop, Hyderabad and confirmed the same. The video is from 2019 or early 2020, the officials informed.

It is noteworthy that in a statement given to The Indian Express, the Hathras victim's mother said that she was pulled out of school in class 5.

Therefore, an old and unrelated video was shared as Annies Kanmani Joy, Deputy Commissioner of Kodagu district who led the COVID fight in her jurisdiction, being felicitated. Joy was a professional nurse before her selection as an IAS officer in 2012. Furthermore, the claim that Kodagu is COVID free is also untrue.