Incidence for Dummies

Incidence is a word that we use to talk about how often something happens or occurs. It can be a little bit tricky to understand, but I'm going to try my best to explain it to you in a way that makes sense. Let's think of it this way: imagine you have a bag of marbles, and each marble represents a time when something happens. The word "incidence" is like counting how many marbles there are in the bag.

So, when we say the word "incidence," we're trying to figure out how many times something has happened. It's like keeping track of how often a certain event occurs. For example, if we want to know the incidence of rainy days in a month, we would count the number of days that it rained during that time.

But, here's the thing, "incidence" can also mean something else. It can also refer to the number of new cases of a particular disease or condition that happens within a certain time. It's like counting how many people get sick with a certain illness in a specific period, like a week or a month.

Let me give you an example. Let's say there's a new flu going around, and we want to know how many people have gotten it. The incidence of the flu would be the number of new cases that occurred within a specific time, like a week. We would keep track of how many new people caught the flu during that week.

So, you see, the word "incidence" helps us understand how often something happens or how many new cases there are. It's like counting the marbles in the bag to see how many times something has occurred, or how many new cases of a disease or condition there are. I hope that makes it a bit clearer for you!