The Trumpiness of India's COVID surge

The government does not want to talk about what the situation is on the ground. They’re very wary of the international coverage that India is getting, instead of trying to actually focus our energy on fixing things. The efforts have been to clamp down on real narratives from the ground and reporting, and instead pretend that everything’s all right and everything’s good. And the other thing they’re doing is curbing testing, asking private labs to stop testing, so that, I mean, if there are no tests, then obviously numbers are going to go down. That’s so reminiscent of what happened here when Trump was in charge. He was saying, well, we’re doing so much more testing—that’s why the numbers are going up. That’s something that’s been used also earlier, but now it’s very explicit orders to curb testing, to stop private labs from taking tests. And even if you do get tested, sometimes you get your results in a week or 10 days. Until then, you either recovered or you died.