Who Died Yesterday

Frank Turk: It is literally 5 times more likely that you will die from flu or pneumonia than you will die from a felon with a gun.

One of the problems that people seem to be worried about these days is what causes people to die.  The US Federal Government tracks this problem of people dying through the CDC here, (all the charts below are sourced from that site) and because the CDC is trying to make sure they got the data right, it looks like they are dragging their feet to keep us up to date (the last comprehensive report is from 2013).

But here’s the thing I wanted to talk about briefly today: how many people (statistically) died yesterday, and by what cause.  Top line, about 7110 people die in the US every single day (all causes).  For reference, that’s like losing the population of  Catoosa, OK, every day — but most of you have no idea where Catoosa is, so it doesn’t seem like a very big tragedy.  Yet when we break it down by “real causes,” somehow we start to feel it.  For example, on average, 1 person (statistically speaking) died yesterday due to complications from appendicitis. (371 people died of it in 2013)  1 Person dies daily from Nephrotic Syndrome (linked for the invasively curious; the Mayo Clinic calls this sort of thing “rare”).  About 2 people on average die from kidney infections daily; 3 daily from Hodgkin’s Disease.

Here’s one which is in news right now thanks to the President’s attention to it:

Right?  That seems like a lot of people dying from guns – an “epidemic” is how it is portrayed in some places.  And let’s be honest: nobody wants anyone to die from guns.  It would be great to see that number at zero, right?  We all agree on that: it’s a bad thing to have people killed by guns.

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Source: iTurk dot com: Who Died Yesterday