Johns Hopkins University that has put out a live coronavirus tracker on Wednesday night, for a brief period, listed India as the country with the third highest cases in the world, with over 5 lakh. The two countries above it were Brazil and the United States.
While India’s cases are constantly rising, the number of cases is around 2.75 lakh cases, as the John Hopkins University tracker updated an hour later, putting India in the sixth.
However, this error resulted in a large Indian diaspora on Twitter calling out the university for ‘false reporting’. Author Ankur Bharadwaj was one of the first to notice it.
Notably, Steve Hanke, a professor of economics at the university on Wednesday also listed India as a ‘bad apple’ for its alleged underreporting of coronavirus cases. In March this year, Hanke predicted that the coronavirus situation in India was ‘spiralling into chaos’.
While the university has not put out a statement for the error, it won’t be forgotten any time soon, thanks to the memory of several Twitter users.
Notably, Johns Hopkins has been leading from the front with a global tracker for coronavirus that is used by media organisations from across the world.
