Hacker News Reader

Some random information in this article....

For instance, they cite almost no lung cancer deaths in Summit county Colorado, while the highest rate is found in Florida.

Well, duh - why the heck would a lung cancer patient want to try and breathe thin air at 9,000 ft??? Sea-level would be much more comfortable.

Not picking on the statistics, but they could have pointed out that some of the variation is purely logical.

View on HN

The three mountain counties in Colorado with the lowest death rates in the US don't have major hospitals. Without hospitals, fewer deaths.

I didn't look into the data, but the CDC and other agencies have policies that set values to 0 in public versions of their datasets if there is a risk of inadvertent PII disclosure. This is particularly the case with smaller cities/counties and rare diseases.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com