Monday, October 5, 2020

Plaguing the Senate, again

A few months back, I did a rough estimate of how many Senators would die if COVID-19 started spreading in the Senate. At that time, the only Senator who had the disease was Rand Paul and, apparently, he wasn't well-liked enough to spread the disease. But the White House, at its nomination ceremony for Amy Coney Barrett, has taken care of that little problem: Republican Senators Ron Johnson, Mike Lee, and Thom Tillis have been infected. It's time to bring the chart back, so here it is again:

The odds were almost 9 in 10 for at least one Senate death and the chance of one to three Senators dying were roughly 3 in 4.

The assumptions the chart is based on are given in my original “1000 Plagues on the Senate” post; perhaps the most questionable is that the chance of any Senator getting COVID-19 is 50%. A more realistic model would probably put Republicans at a higher risk and Democrats at a lower, might also account for committee memberships, and would omit Rand Paul, but I don't know what parameters to use, so I am letting this stand.

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