A furloughed airline employee in Melbourne, Australia won a $1.43 million jackpot. The man, who remains anonymous, is based in Melbourne which is the current epicenter of Australia’s recent Covid-19 outbreak.

The man was sitting at home on Saturday night with his family when he realised he’d won.

“I didn’t believe it. I just calmly cleared the numbers and casually said to my wife ‘hey, can you check that for me’,” he said.

“She scanned the ticket again, and when she saw that we had won, she went into shock. We just kept checking the ticket all day.

“We would have loved to go out to a nice restaurant or something but staying inside is for the greater good, so we popped a bottle of champagne to celebrate instead.”

For the large number of airline employees in the U.S. expecting to be furloughed on or about October 1 (other than those who work for Southwest), I’d offer that the expected value of a lottery ticket purchase is negative. It’d be far more advisable to save the money, given the economic uncertainty, than spend it on a hail mary – this one worker’s luck notwithstanding.

The store where the ticket was purchased has sold 3 winning tickets in 3 years. That doesn’t make the store more likely to sell a fourth winning ticket. It’s not unlikely, in hindsight, for one store to sell that many winning tickets at random – it’s just that you can’t predict which still it’ll be ex ante.