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Comment by jeffbee | Hacker News Reader

TL;DR India has 1400 million inhabitants. They set the world record for everything regularly. Their per capita case rate is still half that of France.

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That's not really the point of the article.

They've gone from 15k new COVID cases a day in early March to 300k in mid April. No other country has seen a 20x rise in cases during that time.

The per capita numbers had a 20x rise over the interval, too, so the per capita numbers are just as good as the totals for conveying that point, and they are better for comparing to other countries. Hence, articles like this one should use per capita numbers.

> so the per capita numbers are just as good as the totals for conveying that point, and they are better for comparing to other countries.

No they're not, because India is in the middle of a case explosion right now. That's a completely different situation than a country with awful per-capita numbers but a low-slope linear growth (like france).

That's not saying france has handled this well (they have not, at all), but next week odds are France will still be seeing 40k cases / day, while India could be closing in on a million.

But you can see that explosive growth equally well in the per capita numbers. The total number is just the per capita rate multiplied by a different number in every country, so there are very few occasions where it is useful to choose it over the per capita rate.

I'm not sure I agree. The title indirectly makes a comparison to other countries, so I agree with you that per capita might be better for that, but the actual article isn't really about how India is doing compared to other countries.

The article really talks about how India is doing in comparison to how it was doing a few months ago and then paints a picture of how dire the situation currently is. I think the raw numbers actually do a better point of getting both those points across.

Anyone who is living in India knows that cases are severely underreported in India. Government is publishing statistics saying city a has x covid deaths in a day. But crematoriums are seeing 10-20x body bags.

You don't even have to believe me. Just look up covid deaths for your city and then go to the city's largest crematorium and count the number of bodies in covid body bags.

(I know you just posted a tl;dr of the article and this is not necessarily your opinion.)

> Anyone who is living in India knows that cases are severely underreported in India. Government is publishing statistics saying city a has x covid deaths in a day. But crematoriums are seeing 10-20x body bags.

What would be the incentive for India's government to do this?

Government on all levels wanting to appear more competent then they actually are?

That was my first thought as well but wouldn't that same logic apply to other countries as well? If not, why is this intentional suppression of COVID cases happening in India and not other countries like the United States and United Kingdom? At what point does the comparison of COVID cases between countries become meaningless as a result of countries manipulating the data they report?

Elections in key states

I suspect this is to do with the probability of getting away with data manipulation and the consequences of getting caught.

State Assembly elections?

> But crematoriums are seeing 10-20x body bags.

What's the source for this data?

Cases are underreported, but deaths to a lesser extent. While the situation is bad, it isn't helpful to throw random numbers around.

Cause that has been massively under reported. The real numbers are at least 10 - 15 times than whats been shown. There are crematoriums where a hundred bodies get burnt in a day and yet the official count stands below 10. And this is just 1 crematorium in one city. Extrapolate this for the entire country and then you'll realize whats actually happening.

Good point but not quite. TN for example and most southern states are doing fairly well.

we wouldn't really know because none of the states are reporting accurately.

Yes this is undeniably true. No matter the extent of infections, all states are under reporting. But some are going extreme. When the furnaces have melted because of continuous body burning and the state reports 20 deaths in the entire state for the day then we know its a massive cover up

yes I agree with the data fudging, however I'm just asking for some restraint in extrapolation. One anecdote of furnace melting does not mean we're in hell. I'm saying this not out of some misplaced sense of patriotism, but that these are incredibly hard times and its easy to spiral into more fear mongering and FUD.

However I'm not defending anybody in this mess. From the US and EU blocking patent waivers to India's government being chronically under capacity, to having people fly to Maldives for late last year. This is a cluster fuck of how stupid humans are at the end of the day.

Please donate whatever you can, we'll get out of this mess.

> One anecdote of furnace melting does not mean we're in hell.

-- This was one anecdote by me here. In reality its all over the news.

-- There are literally thousands and thousands of SOS tweets asking for hospital beds, O2 cylinders and Meds all over the country. Its even live right now.[1] Are you not on social media?

What do you mean "easy to spiral into more fear mongering and FUD" ?? This is literally explaining whats happening and asking for some accountability is somehow bad?. If this is isn't talked about today then when is it going to be fixed?

There are hospitals sending people back because they don't have oxygen supply!

I have lost 2 of my friends and I'm insanely angry at the appalling conditions that I see. Please don't go around asking people to not talk about problems cause it may induce fear!!

[1]https://mobile.twitter.com/search?q=%23OxygenCrisis&src=tren...

[2] https://mobile.twitter.com/search?q=%23CovidSOS&src=trend_cl...

I've lost two grandparents. I know how dire it is and I'm sitting here in the US of A not able to do anything about it.

Key difference being that you're in the US of A, while he's right on the ground in India.

Exactly

Edit: succumbed to the perils of unnecessary abbreviations

This discussion is about India, so "TN" is Tamil Nadu.

Yes i'm from Tirupur, TN. I'm only asking to assume not blindly believe. I'm looking at the various reports from Financial Times and BBC. The hotspots are not uniform but the data fudging is happening at a large scale in the country.

Not disagreeing on data fudging. Just asking for some cooler heads when thinking about the situation.

I dont think you're understanding the urgency or the scale of the catastrophe. People are dying the streets waiting for hospital beds. The doctors are breaking down because of their helplessness. What exactly do you mean by cooler heads? Isn't the apathy shocking?

That situation is specific too, even in my place in uttrakhand(hilly areas) for 40sqkm, area where we have relatives and where we talk in often, very few cases of death have come up. For testing is low can't comment on covid cases but death rate hasn't been much here and situation isn't scary as its shown on mass media channels.

Me now living in rural areas now can say, it better here than urban areas which I initially thought due to lack of health infrastructure would suck, but people have started working on making beds and health infra incase this waves comes to our villages.

I'd wager their record keeping of that number is worse than france...

Getting better, with the help of modernization. though its gonna be a long journey to reach perfection.

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