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I concur. If you are concerned about catching it during your travels, people who don't have it are just as irrelevant as the number of automobiles who don't hav

I concur. If you are concerned about catching it during your travels, people who don't have it are just as irrelevant as the number of automobiles who don't have it; thus, cases per people is just as irrelevant as cases per (people + automobiles). You should be concerned about the fraction of land area on which you are at high risk. If 100 people have it, and each person creates a high risk across A area (and the areas don't overlap), that is 100*A / country-area. Which is proportional to cases/area (presuming A is constant) the first statistic he used. EDIT: if you know you are going to interact with N people, the cases per population figure is relevant again.

owl57 7y ago
Of course you are always going to interact with N people. Your family consists of n₀ people, there are n₁ people in your office, there are n₂ people around you on the train, etc. Area calculations would matter if each infected person somehow densely contaminated an entire circle of a large diameter.
viraptor 7y ago
> presuming A is constant It's that the case anywhere? Even city centre / suburbs will have different values, much less a whole province where A may contain an empty field or a group of residential buildings with 50 floors and shared lifts. I could see how it would be useful for a map of a city, or maybe even at a scale of some regions... but not for comparing totals between regions.
ngneer 7y ago
Interesting point. How would you plot the likelihood of infection?