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I'm not sure about the case at hand here, but one reason for hearing about these events more often than once every 200 years might be because they are uncorrelated.

E.g. a "once in 200 years drought" in California might happen at the same time as a "once in 200 years over-mortality event" in Indiana.

News would tend to report on these, so we see many of these even though they are rare.



Yup. There are a *lot* of events to have a 1 in 200 chance of. Each is a separate chance, the odds add up.




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