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Comment by collyw | Hacker News Reader

Still a small fraction of what Europe has experienced.

https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...

There are serious indications that India is under-reporting death count by a factor of 5-50x. Despite showing 5-10x lower death rate in your source, it was rare for European crematoriums have backlogs like in India [1]

[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/india/non-stop-cremations-cast...

Isn't cremation the go to in India, but second to burials in places like Europe?

cremation is the majority option in northern europe and UK https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_cremation...

I see, still pretty far from India’s 84% though. UK, Sweden, and Denmark are in the 70s, and everything else is lower.

Wouldn’t the opposition parties, independent media, foreign watchdogs raise the alarm if that was the case (prior to the current strain)? This would’ve been a golden opportunity to discredit the ruling government.

Because no one have correct numbers to be frank. Media sometimes does act responsibly can be one of other reasons as well.

But as people pointing here, Indian govt surely not controlling all media outlets. They does manage couple though.

No, arrests and convictions for spreading "misinformation" and "fake news" are very brutal in India currently (at least for those who aren't on the government's side).

The doctors in my family all openly say that the real numbers are at least bigger by a factor of 10.

This is varying a lot by state according to doctors I am connected to. UP and Gujarat are definitely fudging deaths by 5-10x, Karnataka seems to be more or less in line with reported deaths.

My (Indian) wife says that the media just print the good things their party does because if they printed dirt about their opponents, those people would print dirt about them.

If the any of the "independent media" does this, they get censored for spreading "false covid information". It's painted as a conspiracy theory almost immediately.

In Slovakia there were ice truck parked on the street, because crematoriums were full.

There is no reason to under report, because the government provides funds for everything. They may over report it, rather than under report it.

And Belgium counted every possible related death as covid related.

Overreporting 100%

Now that excess mortality figures are available for comparison, Belgium's reporting looks in line with e.g. France or Israel:

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.01.27.21250604v...

As in several other countries, Belgium's excess mortality was lower than the number of reported COVID deaths, but that's most likely because there was a lower number of flu deaths than usual.

https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-...

Looks like we are now over-counting instead of undercounting as we were a few months ago. Well, maybe, since things like car crashes and suicides are down in most places so excess would be negative with lockdowns but without COVID.

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