Table 1.
Descriptive and statistical hypothesis tests of ground personnel resource use per fire day for pre-COVID, during-COVID, and all 2017 through 2021 fire days.
| Ground personnel used per fire day | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Model subsample | n Fire days | Arithmetic mean (SD) | Geometric mean (SD)* | Median | Mann–Whitney-Wilcoxon test |
| Before COVID | 10,679 | 331 (653) | 93 (4) | 126 | W = 6.8 × 106 (p < 0.001) |
| During-COVID | 10,560 | 169 (285) | 51 (5) | 73 | |
| Full sample | 21,239 | 249 (511) | 73 (6) | 96 | |
The null hypothesis for the Mann–Whitney-Wilcoxon test posited that the median ground personnel used/fire day were equal for pre- and during-COVID fire days, and the alternative hypothesis posited that the median ground personnel used/fire day during-COVID would be less than the pre-COVID mean and median.
The model used a negative binomial link function, and therefore the regressors shared a multiplicative relationship with this predicted outcome. Hence, we included the arithmetic and geometric means in this table.