[bauerd]

Mutations are a matter of chance

[tekstar]

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

[christophilus]

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.

[moralsupply]

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.

[tsimionescu]

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.

[uniqueid]

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

[tsimionescu]

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.

[krona]

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

[tsimionescu]

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