Hacker News Reader

Comment by moralsupply | Hacker News Reader

[flagged]

Please don't take HN threads into political or ideological flamewars. We're trying to avoid the inner circles of internet hell here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: since this account has been repeatedly breaking the site guidelines, including using this site primarily for flamewars and ideological battle, I've banned it. Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with. It will eventually get your main account banned as well.

There's definitely an element of truth to that. For example, Italy's mismanagement of Covid-19 probably did immense damage to the world - early on the European outbreaks were basically a gradient radiating outwards from there, there's some evidence that even the US's outbreak came from Italy, and it seems they somehow managed to report zero cases right up until the point a significant proportion of their population was infected which would require really, spectacularly screwing up their testing program - but that narrative never made an appearance in the media because it'd make it harder to blame right-wing politicians in countries like the UK and US which the media dislikes. Instead, the narrative around Italy is that actually, it was the other countries like the UK and the US which screwed up worst because they should've learned from Italy, as though there was something meaningful that could be learned from a country that collected so little useful data. On the other hand, Bolsonaro was really pally with Trump and gets the full blame for everything. I wouldn't even be surprised if there was some mutation during the first Italian outbreak which made Covid-19 more of a danger; there's not really any way we could tell.

(This also basically completely doomed contact tracing in every other western country, because they had no reason to be looking for cases related to people who'd travelled from Italy until it was far too late to start. It's probably not a coincidence that all the countries which made it vaguely work were ones that were close to China rather than Europe.)

There was so much to learn. When the hospitals in northern Italy were being overwhelmed the UK prime minister was telling us to wash our hands more but continue business as usual. This probably cost UK around 50k deaths.

How do you define mismanagement when state and politicians can lie? I doubt COVID-19 stats are 100% reliable and true in any country in the world starting with China. 5 000 people died in China of COVID-19 I mean c'mon.

Yes, Sweden is quite infamous for its own mismanagement of Covid19, it has been attacked for this everywhere in the press often. However, Sweden is a tiny country with a very good hospital system and a relatively wealthy and healthy population, which has compensated somewhat for the incompetence of its government (they still have several times more dead people on their hands than most comparable countries).

Brazil is a huge country in every sense of the word, with a much poorer population, a much worse hospital system, a much kore important role in the world economy, and so it is perfectly poised to become a breeding ground and reservoir for many new strains of Covid19.

And you must be laughably far right to call The Economist left wing. Marine Le Pen would call it a right wing paper.

> And you must be laughably far right to call The Economist left wing. Marine Le Pen would call it a right wing paper.

Did you read the article? It doesn't follow a "right wing" tone.

The article is also not "left wing," either. It's nonpartisan in tone.

Yes, it is a completely non-partisan article. It doesn't even mention Bolsanaro's political affiliation, it just accuses him of coming up with quack cures and dirrctly opposing efforts to contain the pandemic.

It reads like a completely business-like, dispassionate take on the situation in Brazil, appearing in one of the most respected and well-known right-wing newspapers in the US.

> And you must be laughably far right to call The Economist left wing. Marine Le Pen would call it a right wing paper.

I'd consider The Economist neoliberal rather than right-wing, as they have a pretty clear editorial bias in favor of free trade and globalization, but also tend to lean left on social issues. That puts the magazine opposite Le Pen on most issues, given her nationalist positions. Trying to lump them together as "right-wing" is incredibly reductionist.

You can go back and read The Economist's opinion of Le Pen if you'd like, and it's distinctly not charitable.

https://www.economist.com/1843/2016/03/02/marine-le-pen-letr...

Right-wing and left-wing are always somewhat reductionist terms. I would say though that Le Pen and the Economist would find much more common grlund in practice (and lerhaps Le Pen is a relatively bad example here, Bolsanaro or the Polish right or Modi would be even better) than The Economist and Jean-Luc Melanchon or Jeremy Corbyn or even Bernie Sanders.

Sure, there are specific social issues, mainly related to personal liberties, where they would disahree (and Le Pen's populism is always unpleasant to business interests). But the broader topics of interest to the Economist, the improtance of business interests and using the state to further them internationally, are quite aligned. Perhaps Le Pen really believes and would have put her populist promises in action, but I think its far more likely that she would have done just like Trump - spout populist promises but govern with business interests at the forefront.

Sweden isn't likely big enough to produce mutations.

But sure, The Economist is left wing now.

Almost the definition of whataboutism.

Mutations are a matter of chance

My guess is they’re saying if you have a population of 20, you have 20 chances of mutation. If you have a population of 200M, you have 200M chances of mutation. Size matters.

Following that logic China and India should be a lot more problematic than Brazil. As a matter of fact, both of those countries "mismanage" Covid-19 as well.

Isn't Covid19 almost entirely eradicated in China?

India is indeed struggling. They had the good fortune of being hit later than other countries,but they will likely be hit worse.

Of course, when articles critical of India will appear, you'll probably again complain that they are left-wing propaganda against Modi.

Yes, and that chance is a diceroll on every infection, so the more infections, the more times you're rolling that die..

Yes, and for a fixed mutation chance, the bigger the population, the greater the likelihood that a mutation will happen. Say a mutation has a 1 in 1000 chance of happening. For a disease that infects 1000 people, you would expect 1 person to end up with some mutation. If the same disease infects 1,000,000 people, you would expect 1000 mutations to occur.

Likelihood of mutation is not the dominant factor in determining how or why a variant becomes established in a population.

Yes, the size and density of the population and the efforts to contain it are.

It's a matter of chance if a cell has a cancerous mutation, but I still don't want to live near Chernobyl.

If you want something more comparable, how about this: as far as we can tell, pretty much the entirety of Africa completely failed to manage Covid-19. Infection rates there as measured by antibody testing were massive, the population was more than than enough to produce mutations, and it has already resulted in a mutation that's been confirmed to evade at least one crucial vaccine. Yet we haven't seen this kind of narrative about Africa.

Haven't we? https://theconversation.com/south-africa-is-failing-on-covid...

You consider this an equivalent to bashing of Brazil in MSM for months now?

Has that been happening? I don't follow US-based media.

Yes and not only in the USA but also at least in some European countries.

If you say so. Here Brazil has always been of particular interest due to our close historical relationship, so nothing has changed (e.g. "Lava Jato" was also covered much more closely than corruption cases in other countries, left or right-wing).

it's not, everyone can see that the current situation in brazil is far worse then in sweden. Sweden didn't had 200m people the last time I checked

Yet, São Paulo, the worst state in Brazil in covid cases and hospitalizations, has the hardest lockdown

Lockdown depends on two core factors. Social contract (compliance) and enforcement. SP is currently lacking both.

It is not. I was there two weeks ago

Your argument is so bad. If that is the case, then alcohol prohibition was successful only if people complied to it. The same with the war on drugs

Reply on news.ycombinator.com