I think you are thinking way too hard about this. I was providing some dark, sarcastic humor in light of my frustration with America's inability to mitigate this virus. The comparison to India is apples to oranges, and completely irrelevant, which is why I thought it was evident I was being factitious.
I'm honestly not trying to defend myself. I'm just confused as to why you would presume this to be a "core belief," and furthermore, why you would pre-emptively assume I'm going to construe your response as being jingoistic or racist.
I am always happy to read and learn more about what is going on with this virus. If you have information or insight to share, please do.
EDIT: Regarding your edit, I very much share the same view and suspicions. There is nothing jingoistic or racist about that.
While I agree that the USA mishandled it in many ways, the disproportionate numbers reported in the USA reflect the transparency, testing competency, and overall visibility more than they reflect our mishandling in comparison to places like India.
It's open-season on mocking the handling/response in the US and it's become so politically correct to do so that many have permanently lost perspective. They don't remember that China claims to only have a dozen or so flu deaths a year. They weren't in Thailand when the pandemic started like my brother, who likely got sick from on the flight from Bangkok to Istanbul when he sat next to a very sick man from India. I was already wearing full N95 respirators in public/at work when I got sick in March (just before the lockdown) so I likely got it from my brother... whatever it was, since the US visibility was as bad as India's at that point.
My landlords have been back to Thailand multiple times during the pandemic to deal with things like dying family members. Yeah, we know about sicknesses and deaths which went completely unreported in a country most of us wrongly believe has it under control. It's rampant.
India's 1.3 billion people are a lot harder to deal with in a pandemic than the 350 million the US is responsible for but it's already clear that their numbers aren't even relatively comparable. How could they be? Apples and oranges. While the US has the means to test more per-capita and actively supports over-reporting to reduce under-reporting (no way to over-report when it's actually 10x more prevalent than the confirmed cases would indicate), India's economy can't support the same per-capita level of testing or incentives. FFS, they had bloated corpses floating down rivers in their biggest cities while people bathed around them even before all this. It's not a dig at them. If even we had trouble getting visibility on this at first then we must recognize that it's simply too much for their government to handle with the given resources. Therefore, it's unreasonable to think we have an apples to apples comparison.
The US leads the world in death and sickness during this pandemic mostly because we lead the world on reporting. Yes, it's ALSO because we had an incompetent response, but so did most third-world counties. We should have done better, but we can't chalk it all up to the incompetent response part to make knowingly disengenuous comparisons to Asia. Doing so isn't going to provoke a better response in the US to avoid a shameful comparison. That ship has sailed. Obviously, sweeping it under the rug is what let it get so bad in the first place (China, I'm looking at you). The US openly shares embarrassing numbers in the name of truth and transparency which is ultimately good for the rest of the world. The take-away needs to be that this is window into what is actually happening in places like India where we know it is actually much, much, much worse.
People thought it was racist to close our borders to China because they didn't know what was really happening there. As long as we convince ourselves that the US is the worst, these same people will never know/acknowledge the truth.