Fatal dog attacks in the US

As global instant ramen consumption has fluctuated, fatal dog attacks in the US have moved in the same direction with the statistical confidence of two trends that share a pandemic dip and nothing else. The coefficient is 0.855 across ten years, during which both noodles and dog bites followed the same trajectory for reasons that no reasonable person would attempt to connect. The ramen hydrates, the dog dehydrates your sense of safety, and the chart makes no distinction between the two.

Global ramen consumption hovered near 100 billion servings annually, dipping modestly during the pandemic before recovering. Fatal dog attacks followed a similar dip-and-surge pattern: lower during lockdowns (when fewer people were in unfamiliar settings with unfamiliar dogs) and higher afterward as pandemic-adopted dogs encountered the full complexity of post-lockdown life. Both metrics share the pandemic's universal disruption pattern, which is the primary driver of the correlation. Remove 2020–2021 and the relationship weakens significantly.

Ten years of ramen and dog attacks is a pandemic correlation: everything that dipped in 2020 and rebounded in 2021 correlates with everything else that did the same. The noodles were eaten, the dogs were adopted, and the pandemic connected them by disrupting both. The correlation is real. The mechanism is 2020.