Swimming pool drowning deaths in the US

It turns out that as Americans have collectively decided to stop drowning in swimming pools, they have simultaneously and with remarkable coordination decided to buy vegetables from people in parking lots. The correlation is so tight—nearly perfect, in fact—that one begins to wonder if farmers market attendance is simply what happens when you survive your backyard pool. We have apparently quantified the exact rate at which proximity to fresh tomatoes prevents aquatic death.

The calendar does most of the work here. Both series spike in 2020, when lockdowns pushed Americans into their own backyards — farmers markets boomed as an outdoor, supply-chain-proof way to buy food, while home pools filled with unsupervised swimmers and distracted work-from-home parents, and drowning deaths rose accordingly. Neither series is really about the other; they are two symptoms of the same year the country stayed home.

We are pattern-seeking creatures living in a universe that is almost entirely composed of confounding variables, which means we will continue to find meaningful relationships between swimming pools and vegetables for as long as we collect data about both. The real mystery isn't why these datasets move together—it's that we keep being surprised when they do. Two separate stories, told by the same economic boom.