Swimming pool drowning deaths in the US

It appears that between 2008 and 2021, Americans developed an inverse relationship with both water safety and portable cuisine, as if the universe were running a experiment to see whether we could express our collective anxiety through two completely unrelated metrics. The more food trucks we deployed across the nation, the fewer people drowned in swimming pools, a correlation so tight (r=-0.955) that you might think tacos were an actual life preserver. Which is probably unfair to tacos.

The link is not culinary, it is calendrical. Food trucks live on lunchtime office workers, and when offices emptied in 2020 their revenue cratered — while that same summer's backyard-pool boom, with distracted remote-working parents, drove drowning deaths to a decade high. One series tracks where adults weren't; the other tracks where children were.

What we're looking at is not evidence that churros prevent drowning, but rather a reminder that the economy moves through our lives like an invisible choreographer, rearranging where we stand and what we eat and which bodies of water we approach. Two datasets that seem to have nothing in common can move in perfect synchrony simply because they both answer to the same underlying current. You can know this and still find it unsettling.