II.24. Never on Sunday? The Canadian province of Ontario carries out statistical studies to monitor how Canada’s national health care system is working in the province. The bar graphs in Figure II.4 come from a study of admissions and discharges from community hospitals in Ontario. They show the number of heart attack patients admitted and discharged on each day of the week during a two-year period.
(a) Explain why you expect the number of patients admitted with heart attacks to be roughly the same for all days of the week. Do the data show that this is true?
(b) Describe how the distribution of the day on which patients are discharged from the hospital differs from that of the day on which they are admitted. What do you think explains the difference?