Even as the entire world continues its focus on combating the deadly Coronavirus which is devastating countries after countries across the globe, India’s major opposition party Congress party’s single point agenda even in this time of a grave pandemic is to belittle the central government led by Narendra Modi. In such an attempt, the Congress party posted a chart to claim that India has the highest number of Coronavirus cases in the world. But in doing so, the party exposed itself as even the wrong chart does not show what they were trying to prove.
The Congress posted a tweet from its official handle saying that PM Modi was not wrong when he said he would make India a world leader, only he didn’t specify in which category, and now the PM has made India leader in number of coronavirus cases. They attached a chart with the tweet, showing Coronavirus numbers or five countries including India. It shows that India has much greater number of Coronavirus cases at 46,433, compared to the numbers of Pakistan, Indonesia, Singapore and Japan.
Needless to say, it is laughable to claim that India is the world leader in number coronavirus cases based on comparison with just four other counrties, because the deadly virus that originated in China is not limited to these five countries alone. The COVID-19 has spread all across the globe, and there are several countries having more coronavirus patients than India. As per the latest data on worldometers.info website, The United States have 13,24,374 cases the highest in the world, while India’s number as on today is 59,881. Which means India’s total number is less than 5% of the US numbers, which is far from being world leader. In terms of the number of total cases, there are 13 countries above India.
Although being in 14th place in a list of almost 200 countries is still seems very serious, actually India’s current situation is better than that. It is because, rather than the total numbers, what matters is the proportion of the population which is infected. India has the second-largest population in the world, and hence, the number of Coronavirus cases per million population is actually one of the lowest among major countries. And even when compared with the four countries ‘selected’ by the Congress party, India’s position is better than all the other four.
If we calculate the per million coronavirus cases of the five countries mentioned by the Congress party using population data mentioned on US govt’s census website, we find that even among these selected five countries, India comes last, not first, owing to the large population of the country.
| Country | Coronavirus cases as per Congress Tweet | Population in million | Coronavirus cases per million |
|---|---|---|---|
| India | 46433 | 1326 | 35.02 |
| Pakistan | 24073 | 233.5 | 103.1 |
| Indonesia | 12071 | 267 | 45.21 |
| Singapore | 8014 | 6.2 | 1292.58 |
| Japan | 6748 | 125.5 | 53.77 |
Comparing absolute numbers of various countries give a wrong impression, as we can see here. As of today, Singapore has 22,460 Coronavirus cases, which seems better than India. But actually, the city-state’s population is just around 60 lakh, which is less than the major metropolitan cities in India. Therefore, it is wrong to compare the absolute numbers, and the per capita numbers give the true picture of extent of the pandemic.
Therefore, while trying to attack the Modi government, the Congress party actually scored a self-goal in this case. First they excluded major Coronavirus affected countries like USA, China, Italy, UK etc and selectively picked only four countries to compare with India, and then they made a wrong comparison with absolute numbers, instead of using per capita numbers which is the accepted standard practice of comparing data among various countries.