I'm not sure where you're getting your stats, but so far I've gotten
> That's about 10 times less risky than walking down the stairs
and
> That’s the same risk as driving for 5 hours
Which implies that walking down some stairs is equivalently risky to driving for 50 hours. That seems... unlikely.
There are about 150 deaths per 10 billion passenger-miles in the US [1]. That means that a micromort (a 1 in a million chance of death) corresponds to about 66 miles driven, which would probably be about 2 hours of driving.
In 2000, 1,307 people died from falling down stairs[2]. The US population in 2000 was about 280 million, so 1307 / 280e6 / 365 = 1.27e-8, so the average person had about a 12.7 in 1 billion chance of dying by falling down stairs on a given day. It seems reasonable to estimate that on average, each American goes down stairs about once per day (some people never go down stairs, others go down them multiple times per day). As such, I think the estimate for "risk of going down the stairs" should be more like 10 in a billion and less like 10 in a million.
Hey thanks for this. I have the sources next to each. Just click the link in the bottom left corner. Let me know if you don't think they're accurate after having a look.
I took the driving risk as being 250 miles of driving with an average 50mph speed (The risk of dying must be higher at high speed so wanted to take a high average to be fair).
The source on the "10x less risky than going down a flight of stairs" is https://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2.... That shows that in the UK in 2010, 655 people died from falling down stairs. That translates to a 1 in 100,000 annualized risk from falling down stairs -- the relevant comparison is "10x less risky than using stairs a typical amount for an entire year".
Interestingly, running the numbers for the UK shows that the annualized per-capita risk of dying on stairs in the UK is more than twice as high as it is in the US.
Thanks. I'm going to take that one out. Makes it simpler not to do annual risk. Risk difference UK/US is odd! We thought you guys had it bad with gun crime, and didn't think about the stairs....
> That's about 10 times less risky than walking down the stairs
and
> That’s the same risk as driving for 5 hours
Which implies that walking down some stairs is equivalently risky to driving for 50 hours. That seems... unlikely.
There are about 150 deaths per 10 billion passenger-miles in the US [1]. That means that a micromort (a 1 in a million chance of death) corresponds to about 66 miles driven, which would probably be about 2 hours of driving.
In 2000, 1,307 people died from falling down stairs[2]. The US population in 2000 was about 280 million, so 1307 / 280e6 / 365 = 1.27e-8, so the average person had about a 12.7 in 1 billion chance of dying by falling down stairs on a given day. It seems reasonable to estimate that on average, each American goes down stairs about once per day (some people never go down stairs, others go down them multiple times per day). As such, I think the estimate for "risk of going down the stairs" should be more like 10 in a billion and less like 10 in a million.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_safety_in_the_U...
[2] https://danger.mongabay.com/injury_death.htm -- "Fall on and from stairs and steps"