The chart below and the news-report I read this morning leaves me appalled, despairing, indignant and … yes… feeling utterly helpless !
When the dead are not counted accurately and the death-count is allowed to go under-reported like this by governments and health-authorities, we the living collectively must bear the moral responsibility for denying the dead the basic dignity they deserve in death — which is to be at least counted .
In a great war , soldiers lay down their lives on the battlefields on faraway foreign soil and often their bodies go unrecovered for several sad reasons … We commemorate them yet by counting them as the “Unknown Dead Soldier” and giving them a quiet resting place of dignity in an unmarked, unnamed tomb in a memorial cemetery.
Well … looking at this chart and reading the news-report gives me a really sick and terrible feeling deep inside my stomach …
I feel that these several thousands who have faced painful death at the hands of this deadly enemy, the Wuhan virus, and were left uncounted…not even as the “unknown dead”… have been denied by me, in a moral, dhaarmic sense, the solemn honour that they too, from the way they all died battling the Covid disease, deserved to receive as much as that unknown soldier who was slain on some unknown far-off battlefield.
The report does not explain how and why these Covid dead went unaccounted. Was it oversight? Was it deliberate fudging? Was it simply sloppy accounting?
Whatever might be the reasons, the fact of the matter is that such underreporting has grave consequences for the whole world :
It understates the grounds of holding culpable and accountable the country that looks most likely to be the cause for the outbreak of the virus in the first place: China
It understates the pathetic lack of capacity and capabilities of our governments in dealing with a pandemic.
It overrates the mettle of our medical and public-hospital infrastructure, our scientific research institutions and medical-care delivery systems.
It makes our public-health authorities look like crooked accountants who are up to no good.
It also lets our pharmaceutical multinationals — who, by all appearances and accounts today, are simply out to make massive profits out of vaccine-manufacturing — “off the hook” circumstantially …
Let’s not please deprive our dead the dignity of the sad death they have met … That would only be conceding defeat to the enemy, the damned virus.
Sudarshan Madabushi
There have been twice as many deaths from COVID-19 around the world as have been reported, according to the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), which analyzed excess mortality and other factors.
The big picture: The U.S. has undercounted by over 300,000 deaths, while the death tolls in India and Mexico — second and third on the list, respectively — are nearly three times the official numbers, according to the analysis.
“Many deaths from COVID-19 go unreported because countries only report deaths that occur in hospitals or in patients with a confirmed infection. In many places, weak health reporting systems and low access to health care magnify this challenge,” the report notes.
- In Russia, which has used unusually strict criteria for attributing deaths to COVID-19, the IHME estimate is five times the official number.
- In Egypt, there have been nearly 13 deaths for every one that’s recorded, per the report.