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Comment by srean | Hacker News Reader

From the link that you pointed to

    Police officials of Unnao have offered an explanation that the bodies were
    of "people who were dumped in the river or buried on the banks after their 
    families could not afford a proper cremation."

You are trying hard to give the story a spin that dead bodies in the river in such numbers is nothing notable.

Government contractors pressed into removing commemorative burial markers less they be counted by drones

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZiLzIuMsnW0

Let me find something in English to give context on these shallow graves

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Q6hYu3EsC0 (will give viewers an idea of the mindboggling scale of the phenomenon)

The following videos are not in English but you should be able to get a sense of the numbers by looking at them

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALO0VjfxXDA (pardon the annoying and unnecessary dramatization music)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8DWWeOt4jWM

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I am not disputing that people were interring the bodies because they cannot afford cremation. But is that proof that all of them died of covid? In the last video you linked (Burka Dutt one), the pandit gives 2 reasons for more bodies on the river bed: 1. fear of covid 2. cremation charges went up due to covid, which in turn caused people to inter the bodies of non-covid deaths as well.

My point of replying to the original comment which used dead bodies in India's river as a sign of under counting was to question the idea of comparing the current situation to Spanish flu (which killed upto 17-18 million in India). What happened in UP/Bihar (news says up to 2000 bodies were found) is an isolated incident, specific to those states. Can that be used as an indication that the remaining 26 states are hiding, since these 2 are one of the most poorest states in India? I should be hearing news about discarded bodies from other states also right?

> Government contractors pressed into removing commemorative burial markers less they be counted by drones

Since you posted local YouTube channels, do you know how they handled the new dead bodies after the news about this incident broke out?

> But is that proof that all of them died of covid?

All was never even the hypotheses, that is a strawman argument. The hypotheses is that this incident, of thousands of bodies floating down the river and buried on the sand bars, is a striking, once in a century phenomena given the numbers. If this was normal we would have seen such numbers prior to covid.

The major reason, as you had noted as well, is the breakdown of the infrastructure for dealing with deaths by a state that is not competent enough to prevent them. Some state did far better than others. You had mentioned two, Tamil Nadu and Kerala.

Note that the population of UP + Bihar is the same order of magnitude as a middle sized European countries. One does not need other states to contribute if these two are badly hit.

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