BBC’s latest panic att ack

ISN’T it interesting how certain countries, normally barely mentioned, suddenly get huge prominence on the BBC?

For months the Corporation reported on Covid figures from Brazil almost every day, somehow failing to mention that it is the sixth most populous country on Earth – an important context for those statistics.

Nor did they compare it with Peru, which locked down hard where Brazil did not. Yet, at the last count, the two countries had almost exactly the same number of Covid deaths per million – Brazil 1,900, Peru 1,868. The comparable figure for the UK is 1,903. By the way, the Czech Republic, one of the first countries to close its borders and the first in Europe to mandate face coverings, is way above us in this dismal chart, at 2,737 Covid deaths per million.

Now it is the turn of India. Once again, when citing figures, little effort is made to point out that India has a population of almost 1.4 billion. This is more than 20 times the size of ours, now approaching 68 million.

But unlike equally vast China, India has a democracy and a free press so cannot hide its problems the way the Peking police state does. Who really knows what is going on in China?

Under normal circumstances, roughly 26,500 Indian citizens die every day from all causes (the equivalent here is 1,700).

Its health service, by common consent, has always been way behind ours. This – though dist ressing given India’s rising wealth – is nothing new.

We should all be deeply sympathetic to India’s undoubted losses, and do all we can to help a great and suffering country to which we are so closely bound by history. But the use of that tragedy to rekindle panic here is wrong.