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One of my New York county's more rural towns has twice the number (Original Post) ARPad95 Apr 2020 OP
As this digs its way into... Newest Reality Apr 2020 #1
Small numbers are going to act funny. Igel Apr 2020 #2
K&R for the post and the discussion. crickets Apr 2020 #3

Newest Reality

(12,712 posts)
1. As this digs its way into...
Tue Apr 7, 2020, 05:23 PM
Apr 2020

As this digs this way into rural areas, there are many factors that might indicate a much higher mortality rate all over the country and it seems to be just getting started.

This will impact those with great fealty with a heavy blow.

Igel

(35,191 posts)
2. Small numbers are going to act funny.
Tue Apr 7, 2020, 06:03 PM
Apr 2020

It barely hits a large-ish town, just 3-4 people who have jobs, work, whatever. But when it hits one person in a small town it may be a person who has a job, is out and about--or it might be a nursing home and 15 people get nuked by the virus.

It's like the statistical weirdness in Kirkland, WA. Because it spread through a small, closed population at great risk, it "punched above its weight". Over time, most of that averages out. But like any good random, stochastic process, there's always lumpiness.

Making the distribution lumpier, diseases spread through networks. The exponential function assumes random contact between everybody in a town or city, but we know that's not the case. You have a network of friends and coworkers and 99% of everybody else is a stranger, and you're glad of it.

One anecdote sums it up: A professor was talking about random numbers and said he could tell a string of 100 random heads/tails from one made up by students with pretty good accuracy. They doubted him and so he gave coins to some and said to flip the coin and write it down--when done, copy it on the board. Others he said to make their own "random" lists, and copy *those* to the board. He left the room, came back 10 minutes later. He went to the board and pointed to the fake random lists. All the *real* random lists had strings of TTTTT or HHHHH, while the students making the fake ones didn't think you could get strings of heads or strings of tails and avoided them.

Random is lumpy and spikey. Not so notable in a population of 300k, but with 3k or even 30k it really sticks out.

But the lumps and spikes shouldn't be taken as normal.

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