The word "tropical" now reaches Tampa. My team measured it. We began after the Florida Department of Health confirmed the state's first recorded death from dengue on Friday.
Dengue is a disease that mosquitoes carry. The news calls it tropical. Tampa is not in the tropics, so one of those two facts had to move. We went to find out which.
We used twenty-six leaflets. A leaflet is a folded sheet of paper that tells you to empty your bird bath. Each one described dengue as a tropical disease. We carried them north from Miami and checked at every stop whether the word still fit. It fit all the way to Tampa. That is the end of the world as we describe it on paper. A disease moving four hundred miles is a footnote. The paper being wrong is the story.
A control group came next. A control group is a set of leaflets we did not look at. Those were also wrong. The p-value was small, which means the chance we imagined this is low.
