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Comment by Sporktacular | Hacker News Reader

Sweden isn't likely big enough to produce mutations.

But sure, The Economist is left wing now.

Almost the definition of whataboutism.

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).

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.

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