A simple request for the source of a news post related to COVID-19 on Facebook has led to a 30-year-old Sri Lankan man discovering the news of his own death by the deadly virus.
Mohamed Rufinas, a resident of Sainthamaruthu in Eastern Province of Sri Lanka, had commented on a post on Facebook around 8 pm on Saturday. The post was about Sri Lanka reporting its first COVID-19 death at the National Institute of Infectious Diseases Hospital (IDH). Below the post, Rufinas had asked for the source of the information, to which the person who posted the information, Athambawa Jaleel, had tagged Rufinas and had replied, “Sri Lanka’s 1st COVID-19 death reported at IDH, that of a diabetic patient (65) from Marawila, who also had undergone a kidney transplant - Health Ministry - adaderana.lk.”
However, hours later Rufinas received a message on WhatsApp from his friend who shared a snippet about the first Sri Lankan victim of COVID-19. “His message said that the victim and I share the same name,” Rufinas told TNM. What intrigued him was that he had thought his name was quite modern and couldn’t really believe someone born in the 1950s could also have the same name. Piqued with curiosity, he asked his friend for more details.
“Basically I remembered that nothing about his religion was revealed by the government and hence thought maybe they had revealed it later. I was just curious. When my friend sent me a screenshot from Twitter, which had my name, a sense of familiarity crept in,” he says. In fact, the tweet was copied from Jaleel’s response to Rufinas on Facebook, and pasted directly. However, the person who had tweeted had also copied the Rufinas’s name which was a tag on Facebook.
“The tweet went viral because it was posted as a response to a handle of a Sri Lankan journalist I think and people started paying their condolences to Rufinas,” he explains. The news snowballed within hours on social media sites and instant messaging platforms like WhatsApp where numerous condolence messages were posted. A few Facebook users also named the death by COVID-19 as ‘horrible’ and expressed their condolence to Rufinas.
“I felt it was funny overall. But it pained a little when people started posting this message along with a video of the last rites of a Muslim which has no relation to COVID-19 at all. It was an old video and was unnecessarily being tagged as my last rites. To me, having last rites with very few people around would be painful,” he says.
Rufinas however took to Facebook and posted memes/stills of popular Tamil movies like Dhool and Run to get his point across - “I could even accept that you guys thought I died, but to call my death ‘horrible’ was just too much’, he posted. ‘I just asked for the source and you killed me’, he said, with a pinch of humour, on his Facebook page.
When quizzed about his family’s reaction to the drama, Rufinas says that most of them just laughed it off in the right spirit. “I made sure my mom didn’t get to see this because it is a tough thing for any mother to see. Also there is a chance that she will ban me from social media as well,” he says. However, Rufinas’s mother eventually came to know about this from a few relatives later and brushed it off as humour.