this is better than the vox article, which says something about the vox article given the place that maclean's holds in canadian journalism, but even normalizing at 50 is pretty sketchy.

canada is the biggest country in the world. germany is roughly the size of one of the atlantic provinces. so, just in terms of the probability of getting from zero to fifty without it taking off, you could have all the way up to fifty different isolated deaths in canada before you get to an epidemic in germany.

i know you have to do the graph somehow, and this is purposefully extreme, but it gets the idea across.

to start with, if you're going to compare small countries to canada, you should begin by looking at provinces, or even regions, rather than the whole country - but that's just a start. while germany isn't much bigger than new brunswick, the population density is also astronomically higher - another incredibly important factor.

it's going to be hard to do this right until this is done, and until then the data is going to reflect the biases of the person that plotted it.

https://www.macleans.ca/society/health/coronavirus-deaths-these-charts-show-how-canada-compares-with-the-world/