The news here in the UK over the last couple of months has focussed on the unfolding catastrophe of Covid19 in India. It has been implicit in pretty much all of the coverage that the situation there is much much worse than we have suffered in the UK, and this has been backed up by numbers showing just how many more people have died in India than here.
True to form, our media have almost universally failed to take into account the fact that the population of India is nearly 25 times bigger. I think dividing one number by another is not part of the training....
Here's a chart that puts things in context. I've used 66.65 million for the UK population and 1.366 billion for India:
- INDIA OFFICIAL: These are the Indian government official statistics republished by JHU CSSE COVID-19 Data showing 311,000 deaths
- INDIA ESTIMATE: These are from David Spiegalhalter and are based on excess mortality. The best estimate is 1.6 million but could be as low as 600,000 or as high as 4 million. According to Speigalhalter 90% of UK covid deaths in the UK are people with additional health problems, but India does not count a death as caused by Covid in these cases. Clearly this accounts for a large part of the undercounting in the official figures.
- UK: These are official statistics republished by JHU CSSE COVID-19 Data.
The timeline currently shows that the wave in India is only just past it's peak whereas the wave in the UK has almost completely passed so we can expect the final figures to show more or less the same mortality rate in the two countries.
Clearly part of the problem is that our media cannot divide one number by another, but it's possible that there are other drivers of the misleading reporting. One factor may be that the pictures from India are better. We don't have open air cremation in the UK and so there's no opportunity for that Pulitzer prize winning photo. Maybe the death rate doesn't convey the whole story - certainly our NHS just about coped with the 2nd wave and this may not have been the case with Indian healthcare. But there's also the possibility that a combination of national pride and predjudice have coloured the reporting in this country, and we are biased towards telling a story where we Stay Calm And Carry On whilst other countries - whether it be India, Italy, or Spain - collapse into chaos.
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