What incentive does the country have to under report COVID deaths? Get some glorious trophy from the west on its stellar COVID management?
Save face with people and continue winning elections? The people don't blame the government for covid.
Not to mention, the numbers are reported independently by the states, ruled by very different political parties.
It's obvious that officials have many incentives to downplay the impact, and dodge and shift blame. When local officials lie, their national government will probably repeat the lies, perhaps unknowingly
I'm not sure that's true. And if it were to be true, I'm not sure how it speaks against the claims made in this article?
> What incentive does the country have to under report COVID deaths? Get some glorious trophy from the west on its stellar COVID management?
I don't think TFA is trying to establish what incentives an administration may have to try to demonstrate their administration was more effective than it actually was. (Though, having written that out loud ...)
> Save face with people and continue winning elections? The people don't blame the government for covid.
I admire your optimism regarding the passive objectivity of 'the people'.
Generally, I'd expect a population (within any ersatz democracy) to evaluate the quality of its administrators based on their performance during a pandemic, and subsequently vote accordingly.
> Not to mention, the numbers are reported independently by the states, ruled by very different political parties.
How would you expect this to play out if every incumbent politician / political party in each state, was incentivised to downplay mortality rates from COVID19?
I'm not sure how this somehow, every month, is "hacker" "news"
When Trump was in power CNN had a covid death count being displayed 24/7. America's ranking in deaths was constantly mentioned.
When he lost the election it was removed.
2021 saw more covid deaths in the US than 2020. Despite vaccines being available. This received almost no coverage.
And now, in the US the cases and deatha in individual states is used for political gain by both sides. Especially when the states governor is seen as a possible political candidate.
CNN might be partisan but I don't know that this is a good example. In 2020 COVID was new, and people were all clamoring to see new updates about it. Trump being in office was (I think) somewhat incidental.
In 2021, I think people are tired of hearing about COVID as much and as a result it didn't get the total 24/7 coverage as often. I remember a similar thing happening shortly after 9/11.
It's about incentives and costs at every level. If the person filling out the death paperwork writes covid, does that require more work than not writing covid (paperwork, cleaning, testing, etc)? Does it bring shame to their work, their colleagues or facility or community?
I was merely pointing out that the we should also take the incentives of these "scientists" under consideration.
> what a supposedly bias scientist living in Canada has to gain
Just speculating: the same thing any bs vendor stands to gain. Relevance and funding..
Again, what they say could actually be true. This simply isn't rigorous enough and it boils down to "I think the number is higher"
Local politicians may have other motives - there have been close links of COVID prevalence among the extreme poor / in slums [1], for example. Concealing COVID deaths may be an attempt to hide the fact that the government has failed to serve that community.
Additionally, there may be fiscal impacts based on COVID classification - not sure what India in specific is doing, but for example, the US covers funeral costs for COVID deaths. Three million COVID funerals are a lot of money.
> Save face with people and continue winning elections? The people don't blame the government for covid.
Oh yes they do. A large part of why Germany's Conservative-led coalition was shot down in last year's election was the handling of the coronavirus pandemic - incompetence on all levels of government as well as some conservative backbenchers taking nearly 50 million euros in sketchy mask deals [2].
In contrast, factually good management politics can earn historic landslide wins [3].
[1]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.06958
[2]: https://www.sueddeutsche.de/bayern/bayern-lobbyregister-poli...
I should have been clearer. Indians don't blame the government for COVID as evidenced by election results everywhere in the country irrespective of the political spectrum. Even places where the incumbents lost, COVID was a non issue.