Swimming pool drowning deaths in the US

There is something deeply unsettling about learning that Americans eat more ice cream in precisely the years when more of them drown in swimming pools, as though Rocky Road were somehow involved in the tragedy. The correlation is strong, positive, and almost certainly has nothing to do with dairy products impairing one's ability to tread water, though the data does make you want to finish your cone before getting in. One hesitates to call it a classic, but this is the spurious correlation that statistics professors have been warning us about since roughly the invention of both ice cream and swimming pools.

The variable tying these together isn't sugar — it's the summer of 2020, when Americans stuck at home bought freezers, filled them, and then made more unsupervised use of their backyard pools than in any year on record. Drowning deaths rose with the same demographic that was ordering ice cream by the gallon, because both were expressions of the same thing: a country that spent an entire summer in its own backyard.

This correlation has been used in every introductory statistics class for decades, and yet it keeps working as a cautionary tale, which suggests either that we are slow learners or that the urge to connect ice cream to drowning is somehow hardwired into the human brain. The sun does not care about your scatter plot. Neither does the ice cream.