On Thursday, two unattended currency notes of ₹500 created a sense of panic among the residents in Paper Mill Colony, Lucknow. The locals insisted that the notes were kept on the road to deliberately transmit the Wuhan Coronavirus infection. Police suspect that the panic was triggered by a Whatsapp video that has also been doing the rounds on social media.
In the viral video, a woman can be heard saying that someone rang their doorbell and had left a ₹500 rupee note on the doormat. The son then sprayed sanitiser on the currency note and cautiously slid it under the neighbour’s door. He then retreated back into his room. The contentious video had created mass hysteria among the residents of Paper Mill Colony.
!BEWARE!
— Naweed (@Spoof_Junkey) April 5, 2020
In harkato pe utar aaye hain ye jaahil, can you guess his name? pic.twitter.com/q79buGtaTD
The cops were called in and a doctor was also briefed about the situation. The notes were kept separately for 24 hours. No police action has been initiated to track the video. While ensuring social distancing, the residents of the colony engaged in serious discussion beyond midnight about how currency notes were used to spread coronavirus. They only left to their respective houses after the police intervened.
The fear of the residents of Lucknow’s paper Mill Colony may well be grounded on certain events in the recent past. Earlier, the Nashik police had taken to Twitter to inform that a Muslim man, whose video of licking and wiping nose with a bunch of currency notes and calling Coronavirus a punishment by Allah was doing rounds on social media, was in the police custody. The Muslim man in the video used few 500 denominations notes to wipe his nose and mouth as he looked into the camera and said, “There is no cure for a disease like Corona because it is the punishment of Allah, for you people.”
