> massive population

I think population size is incredibly underappreciated. It's hard to comprehend large numbers.

More to the point, 1.3 billion people. On par with China. Those are the two most populous nations in the world. Third place is the United States. With 334 million people, which is 1/4th in size compared to India or China.

To put that in perspective: the world population today is 7.7 billion. Those 3 countries together constitute about 37% of the global population.

https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/countries/world/#peop...

273.000 cases on april 18th, that's 0.021% of India's population.

To be clear: I do not intend to diminish the amount of suffering. 273k a day is an insane number of people who require specialized healthcare.

India is also a microcosmos unto itself. It's an incredibly complex and diverse society due to it's sheer size. That's also something which is underappreciated if you live across the world. Even in this day and age, it's worth being aware of the fact that news from India tends to be condensed in a few terse paragraphs published on, predominantly western, ephemeral online outlets. In the process, the complexity of India is easily lost.

Why is that important? Because many readers of the news will tend to compare that to their own frame of reference.

When people argue about the accuracy of numbers from PCR testing, hospital admissions, deaths,... it's easy to forget that this pertains to a 1.3 billion people across a diverse continent, having conditions which aren't at all equal regardless of where you travel.

My point here is this: the vastness and the complexity of the continent compared with a rapidly unfolding event make it hard to observe and comprehend what is going on.

This isn't a new issue. It was, and to an extent still is, an issue when one tries to assess the exact impact of the Spanish Flu in India:

The number of deaths caused by Spanish Flu in India is an estimate as well ranging from 12 million to 17-18 million on Wikipedia. And that's during a time when the population was vastly lower then it is today: the 1921 census states recorded a population of 318 million.

What historians do have asserted is the social and political impact of the pandemic on the Indian sentiment regarding the then colonial rule, and, in the long run, triggered a long rally towards independence. Even though exact data are hard to come by.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1918_flu_pandemic_in_India
https://www.censusindia.gov.in/Census_And_You/old_report/cen...

Even in this day and age, the fact that everyone - scientists, data experts, policy makers - are puzzled and wildly speculating about what's going on in India is also a reflection of the limited capabilities of modern technology as well. Even in an era of digitization it's still extremely hard to gather data from a complex, rapidly involving context and being able to ask relevant questions which will yield to a more accurate explanation.

Rather then enless speculating about the exactness of data, the big question for Indian policy makers on all administrative and governmental levels would be: how to respond? how to save lives? how to protect the country's infrastructure? And how to do all that in a flexible, transparent, effective manner which can capture / cater to the complexity of the Indian nation.