| Exactly what pool of people are we drawing from here? How big is our denominator? - Anthony Chavez was a foreman supervising construction at Los Alamos. Retired in 2017. - Melissa Casias (from this article) was an administrative assistant at Los Alamos. - Steven Garcia was a "property custodian at KCNSC." - Jason Thomas was associate directory of chemical biology at Novartis (pharma company) on cancer treatment. - McCasland retired 13 years before he went missing. - Nuno Loureiro was a plasma physicist at MIT. So the denominator here has to include: - current and former employees (at all levels, including clerical positions like Melissa Casias or construction workers like Anthony Chavez) of government research facilities - management at pharmaceutical companies (or presumably, other STEM companies as well?). - academics working in STEM fields (MIT plasma physicist Nuno Loureiro) So you have to ask yourself two questions: - how big is the pool that we're drawing these deaths from? and - given a pool of this size, how many people in it would you expect to die in a ~3 year period? To me the answer is really boring - this number of deaths is just utterly unsurprising. It honestly doesn't even rise to the level of being a "coincidence." It's a complete non-event. |