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.
- 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.