Fudging Covid news by The Hindu

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Fake news is of several kinds: it can be something that's blatantly false, or it can be more subtle. Here we see how The Hindu misleads its readers with its data. The Hindu chooses to show the *absolute number* of cases, while it shows the number of tests in *per million population* terms.

This makes India's position look alarming -- in the chart, it appears that India has nearly the same number of cases as the US, but is only conducting less than 1/10th of its tests per million. This can lead people to believe that if India were to test as much as the US, its actual number of cases would be a lot more. 

But what this "analysis" cleverly ignores is India's population: India's population is 4x more than the US, so its absolute cases are bound to be comparatively higher. Also, India is a much poorer country than the US, so it's obvious that its number of tests will be lower. 

If we look at India's and US's cases number on a per million population basis, a completely different picture emerges: India's cases per million are less than 1/10th of the US. And the number of total tests is 1/4th of the US, in spite of India not having the same financial resources as the US to conduct lots of tests.

But by cleverly showing the number of cases in absolute terms, and the number of tests in per million terms, the Hindu makes India's position look a lot worse than it is. If they had any journalistic integrity, they would show both cases and tests in absolute terms, or both in per million terms. But that would be expecting too much from The Hindu, wouldn't it?


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