Not that it’s a numbers game, of course, but there’s quite a difference between the low media report-based estimates like 85,000 and the various statistical estimations and surveys that peg the excess death count at beyond 1 million people. I certainly remember my high school textbooks breathlessly exclaiming the number of people Hitler and Stalin killed (funnily enough they left competing mass-murderer Suharto out, though I think Pol Pot warranted a mention).

A government who has run out of ideas, whose talent pool has entirely been used up and whose natural tendency is for increasing control and centralisation AND that has lost the media initiative entirely and is hell bent on reclaiming it with eye-catching initiatives no matter how ill thought out and cretinous they might be.