> so the per capita numbers are just as good as the totals for conveying that point, and they are better for comparing to other countries.

No they're not, because India is in the middle of a case explosion right now. That's a completely different situation than a country with awful per-capita numbers but a low-slope linear growth (like france).

That's not saying france has handled this well (they have not, at all), but next week odds are France will still be seeing 40k cases / day, while India could be closing in on a million.