The Lotto Paradox

I really hoped this article about modeling the flu would be more interesting (especially since one of the teams doing the modeling has used data from Where's George?). The last quote in the piece almost redeemed the whole thing, though: "'People have a very weird perception of large numbers,' he [Dirk Brockmann, the engineering professor who leads the epidemic-modeling team at the Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems] said. 'If you have 2,000 cases of flu in a country of 300 million, most people think they're going to be one of the 2,000, not one of the 299,998,000.'" The lotto paradox?