Getting It On (And On, And On…)
What. The. Fuck.
Police in Orlando, Florida claim “a typical prostitute that’s HIV-positive could potentially infect more than 18,000 people a year.”
Taking into account HIV transmission probabilities, Classically Liberal estimates that SuperProsti would have to serve at least “9 million customers [per year]. Disney World only manages 27 million.”
Mathematical illiteracy can be shocking sometimes. A professor of mine recently pointed out an article in the Lincoln paper which gave the probability of various teams winning the Big 12 North conference in football. The percentages added up to 235% (or some number like that). Apparently the writer just didn’t understand that there couldn’t be five teams all with a greater than 1/3 chance of winning the title.
The police may be innumerate, but they probably aren’t stupid. I’m sure what they meant was that 18,000 people could be infected within a year starting from one prostitute (everyone the prostitute had sex with, everyone they had sex with, etc.). This is assuming a 100% transmission rate, which is of course totally untrue, but otherwise it’s not obviously ridiculous. I suspect the number is too high even assuming 100% transmission, but not by an order of magnitude.
In any case, the explanation seems simple. One day the police chief wondered how dangerous an infected prostitute actually was, but nobody on the force knew. They figured the transmission rate must be pretty high, since AIDS is well known to be a dangerous disease. Eventually, the most mathematically inclined cop made up some figures for how often people have sex, particularly the sort of people who visit prostitutes, and summed it all up. The result was shockingly high, so the police decided they need to publicize this danger.