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Comment by erfgh | Hacker News Reader

It's because they don't test as much and they are not eager to mark deaths as covid-19.

None of the countries who tried to hide it really succeeded, like Iran or China. There is no reason to believe governments of India or Bangladesh are more competent in this coverup business than those experts.

I'm a Bangladeshi and I don't trust my government a singe bit. Still, I believe that while these numbers may not be exact, they are not wildly off the mark either.

It's not a coverup, they just don't care that much.

This frankly stupid meme needs to die. Not testing can hide the disaster only for a maximum of 3 weeks, after which the dead start piling up.

Considering that the dead have not being piling up anywhere in India, I'd say India has succeeded in managing it all.

It's easy to hide the number of deaths too. How often does an average person actually see a dead person? Almost never.

Whoever controls the narrative, decides on what numbers to report.

Despite what some sections of the internet might want to portray or believe, India is not a totalitarian state in the vein of China or Vietnam that can effectively censor speech on an almost watertight level. There is no Great Firewall here that can filter internet traffic in real time that such a large scale narrative control requires. And even China with the great firewall was not able to hold this in completely.

Do you think the government would have been able to hide the large number of deaths that would have occurred, if the death rate was the same as reported by Europeans and Americans? It's not easy to hide a large amount of bodies, given that half of the country is ruled by political outfits that oppose the central government.

The dead bodies in real life don't just vanish into thin air like in star wars.

You painting Indian government as this corruption-free bastion is cute. All it takes is a bunch of local government heads to look better than the other regions, and there you go - they report fake numbers. Or it can be worse, they pretend to do N tests, while paying for 1% of N tests, and faking the rest, putting the difference in their pocket.

The latter half of your sentence is incorrect. I agree we can still do more testing.

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