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CLAIM: The Chief Executive Officer of the Korle-Bu Teaching Hospital, Dr Yakubu Seidu Adam, has said that the viral video showing patients lying on the floor at the facility’s Accident and Emergency Centre may have been fabricated.
VERDICT: FALSE. Independent checks by DUBAWA reveal a similar spectacle of patients lying on the floor of the emergency ward. Additionally, multiple independent AI detection tools found no credible evidence of artificial intelligence generation in the viral image. The video appears to be authentic.
Full Text
A video circulating widely on social media in the third week of March 2026 showed patients at the Accident and Emergency Centre of the Korle-Bu Teaching Hospital apparently lying on the floor and being nursed in chairs — images that triggered public outrage and drew significant attention to overcrowding conditions at Ghana’s premier teaching hospital.
In response to the viral footage, several social media accounts attributed a statement to Korle-Bu Teaching Hospital CEO Dr Yakubu Seidu Adam, claiming he had described the video as AI-generated and therefore inaccurate.
The claim quickly gained traction, with some users using it to dismiss concerns about conditions at the hospital’s emergency department.
DUBAWA Ghana decided to verify whether the viral video or image was indeed AI-generated, using multiple independent detection tools.
Verification
To assess the image’s authenticity, DUBAWA conducted an independent visit to Korle Bu Teaching Hospital. During this visit, DUBAWA captured video documentation that corroborated what was shown in the original viral footage.
While the authenticity of one image has been questioned by the hospital’s CEO, both pieces of footage share striking visual and contextual similarities.
Both images are located within the physical confines of Korle Bu Teaching Hospital, captured at what appears to be the facility’s front entrance.
The first image captures additional patients lying on the ground at a distance within the hospital’s interior spaces.
The second image, extracted from the viral video, shows two patients lying on a concrete floor, close to one another.
The most striking similarity between the two images is their shared subject matter: patients in severe accommodation distress.
Both photographs depict human beings who, for lack of available beds, have been reduced to lying on hard floor surfaces within a major healthcare facility.
DUBAWA Ghana ran checks using four AI image-detection tools, with Image Whisperer proving the most comprehensive platform.
Image Whisperer deploys multiple independent scientific models simultaneously, ensuring that no single tool determines the verdict alone.
Screenshot of the results from the AI image detection tools
The results were as follows:
Sightengine, a commercial AI scanner, found no AI patterns, returning a score of just 1% — a strong clearance.
B-Free Visual DNA, an academic AI detector using the DINOv2 vision model trained to detect the subtle differences between real photographs and AI-generated images, returned a score of 4% — also clear.
SPAI, a frequency spectrum analysis tool presented at CVPR 2025, converts images into a hidden frequency spectrum to look for patterns that AI generators leave behind, and returned a score of 0%, finding entirely normal patterns.
CommFor, a community forensics model trained on 2.7 million images from 4,803 different AI generators and using a Vision Transformer architecture, returned a score of 24% — the highest among the tools used, but still within the cleared range.
HiFi-Net++, a forensic classifier, found no evidence of forgery, returning a score of 0%.
Across all eight models deployed by Image Whisperer, seven returned a clear verdict, and only one flagged any concern, and even that single flag did not reach a threshold indicative of AI generation.
The platform’s own conclusion: the image is not AI-generated.
It is worth noting that the Minister of Health paid a working visit to the Korle-Bu Accident and Emergency Centre on Saturday, March 21, 2026, apparently prompted by the viral video, and reportedly left with the impression that the social media publication was inaccurate.
However, the Korle-Bu Doctors’ Association (KODA) directly challenged that conclusion in a press statement issued on Monday, March 23, 2026. KODA said it is standard practice in hospital environments to tidy and reorganise ahead of ministerial visits, and that the conditions the Minister witnessed during his tour were not a true reflection of the daily reality at the emergency department.
“It is normal practice to prepare before a visit by a minister of state. New bedsheets are provided for all beds, including those previously without bedsheets; everything is re-arranged to look perfect,” KODA said.
The association further warned that the “No Bed” overcrowding situation was real, dangerous, and unsustainable, and called on hospital management and the Ministry of Health to stop deflecting responsibility.
Statement from the Korle Bu Doctors’ Association
CONCLUSION
The claim that the viral video showing patients on the floor at Korle-Bu Teaching Hospital’s Accident and Emergency Centre was digitally fabricated is false. Independent checks by DUBAWA and multiple AI detection tools, including commercial, academic, forensic, and frequency-based models, found no credible evidence of artificial intelligence generation in the image. Seven out of eight models returned a clear verdict.
The video appears to be authentic. The Korle-Bu Doctors’ Association has separately confirmed in a public statement that overcrowding at the emergency department is a genuine and ongoing crisis, further undermining the basis of the CEO’s alleged claim.
