But a study of patients with gonorrhea had found that they’d had only 1.5 recent partners on average.[60] Even if the probability of transmission during sex was very high, it suggested that there simply weren’t enough encounters for the disease to persist. What was going on? If we just take the average number of partners, we are ignoring the fact that not everyone’s sex lives are the same. This variability is important: if someone has a lot of partners, we’d expect them to be both more likely to get infected and more likely to pass the infection on.
