Does Eating Ice Cream Lead to Drowning? Not If You Understand Confounding

The data will not analyze itself.

Sherbet would have been a better choice. (Photo by Marino Linic on Unsplash)

Suppose you’re an epidemiologist at a local health department in a resort town. The town council just had a person give testimony that ice cream leads to drowning, and they have the data to prove it. They pulled 700 random records from the local ice cream shop over the last five…