India, COVID and Mainstream Media Truthiness

While India is garnering the mainstream media's ceaseless attention to all things COVID, there are a couple of things that we need to consider.

 

First, here is a graph from Our World In Data showing the number of cumulative COVID-19-related deaths per million people for the United States, the United Kingdom and India:

 

As you can see, India totally missed the first and second waves of COVID-19-related deaths which peaked at 0.18 percent in the United Kingdom in January 2021, 0.104 percent in the United States also in January 2021.  Currently, India's COVID-19 death rate is 0.018 percent, roughly one-tenth of the peak death rate of the United Kingdom.  Certainly, the death rate in India will increase as time passes but, as you can see, currently it is well below the rates experienced in two of the world's most affected nations and, as shown here, has relatively little to do with where the advanced economies of the world are headed.  Interestingly, we'll never see this reported in the mainstream media.

  

As well, thanks to the internet archive, here is a screen capture taken from a sad and rather alarming story that appeared in the New York Post on April 26, 2021:

Here is a closeup of the photo which appeared in the article purporting to show an Indian woman "dying" in the street of COVID-19:

 

Oddly enough, you can see the same woman wearing purple clothing lying on the sidewalk while the young woman in the multi-coloured top and white pants with a dark stripe in this photo:

 

The only problem is that this photo was found in a news story on Sky News dated May 7, 2020 reporting on a gas leak at an LG Polymers plant located in Andhra Pradesh:

 

 

So, either the same ill woman in India was lying on the sidewalk wearing the same clothing and being attended to by the same young woman nearly 12 months ago as a result of a gas leak and was ill yet again in late April 2021 due to COVID-19 or the mainstream media is lying to us or just doing sloppy reporting.

  

Fortunately for us all, the New York Post posted this small retraction at the bottom of the edited story, blaming Reuters for their misstep/sloppiness:

 

This begs the question; how often has this happened in the past year when it comes to reportage on the pandemic?

If there is one thing that the world has taught us in the past year it's that we are living in a post-truth era where the mainstream media has become a big part of propagating a false, government-created narrative that is being used to stoke fear and keep us all in line.