Sorry if this seems ghoulish.
I guess it is part of an attempt to put the events of 9/11 in some kind of context. My supervisor needed to fly a few days ago. I asked him if he was nervous. His reply was along the lines of “well, only a few hundred people in planes died that day. Thousands died on the ground. So being in a plane was actually safer”. The problem with this, of course, is that it would really be a matter of percentages…what percentage of people in the air over the US was in those four planes, and what percentage of people on the ground in the US were killed. I suspect that being on the ground was, statistically, far safer that day. I realized, though, that I didn’t even know a ballpark figure for the number of people in the US who die on a “normal” day. (Note: I didn’t say how many Americans die each day, because many of those killed were not Americans).
So, the General Question: How many people die on average in the 50 states per day, all ages, all causes?
The Center for Disease Control, using 1998 as the last year for which it published statistics, said there were 2,337,258 deaths that year. Divided by 365, that gives 6,403. So on 9/11, we approximately doubled the number of daily deaths.
Thanks, tomndebb. That was exactly the kind of thing I was looking for.
The one entry that surprised me was the one for accidents: 97,835 deaths that year, or roughly 270 per day for the nation. I would have thought the number of dead from auto accidents alone per day would have been about that.
Thanks for the additional info. So, that works out to about 110 people per day, roughly. Again, lower than I would have guessed, but I don’t know why I thought that.
The other thing the list brings home to me is that roughly two thirds of the people who die in this country each year die from heart disease, cancer, stroke or COPD. I guess I knew this academically, but seeing the total numbers is pretty sobering.
That the number of deaths daily caused by smoking was equivalent to:
“Four fully loaded jumbo jets crashing and killing all aboard.”
I once checked on this and if anything it seemed a bit small. It is a truly shocking amount. I don’t think people will use this comparison any more. But it does highlight how well hidden from our view smoking related deaths are.